1st January 1987
Carriers at War
Your Japanese carrier task force bears down, through the darkness before dawn on 7th December 1941, on the unsuspecting American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
You check the intelligence plot - they are still at Pearl, nothing reported in the other harbours, nothing at sea or in the air. The weather is clear, although there is cloud to the east and the prediction is for squalls. You check the course and speed of your carriers.
Three hours before dawn. You order the aircraft to arm, and 15 minutes later reports show feverish activity on the hanger decks. At first light to give the target and launch the strike. The ticking clock shows its progress, but you can only guess until the first aircraft return with tales of sinking battleships. How accurate are they? You order a second strike, and redirect part of it to the American airfields. Finally, as the last strike is recovered, you turn and steam for home.
This in itself would be an excellent wargame, but it is only the teaching scenario for Carriers at War, from the Australian design team of Roger Keating and lan Trout. The player takes either side against the computer or another player not only at Pearl but at Coral Sea, Midway, the Solomons, Santa Cruz and the Philippine Sea.
You need a disk drive and your own disks, and the game isn't cheap, but neither is a Rolls Royce. The designers say they have somehow crushed 80K of machine code into the program, and the result is a naval wargame such that I have seen nothing to compare with it.
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