Review: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator

Ad Astra Games is a Waterloo, IA-based producer of educational games. “Our games, in addition to being a lot of fun, are also educational, with a strong background in the physical sciences, or economics, biology or history.”

Saganami Island Tactical Simulator uses the critically acclaimed Attack Vector: Tactical game engine to put you in command of the ships of the Honorverse. Thrill to the long range missile duel, dancing in 3-D vector space with broadsides of laser heads. Or close in to “kissing distance” and unleash the titanic fury of grasers and lasers! An innovative card draw mechanic incorporates “The Honor Factor” without turning the game engine into a series of speciall cases modifying special cases.

Extensively researched, SITS has new material on the ships and doctrines of the Royal Manticoran Navy and the People’s Republic Navy. Building rich tactical depth from easy-to-use Newtonian movement, SITS builds on the novels to give you control of small squadron actions in the Honorverse.

SITS uses two game scales: the tactical game features 7.5 minute turns and 125,000 km hexes, while the system scale uses 25 light second hexes and 1 hour turns. Simple rules allow play to transition smoothly between scales, allowing players to conduct operations starting with dropping out of hyperspace and ending in furiously swirling close actions.

Every warship in the series will be statted-out over the course of this product, including additional ships approved by David Weber himself.

• SITS offers tactical control without massive record keeping—watch salvoes of hundreds of missiles melt away with a handful of die rolls.
• The simultaneous Sequence of Play means that everyone at the table is doing something, rather than waiting for the other guy to finish his turn.
• An accurate, intuitive 3-D movement system allows combat to break the plane of the map, producing unprecedented tactical depth.

The Saganami Island Tactical Simulator includes:

• Baen Books Honorverse CD-ROM with the entire series
• One 80-page rulebook
• One 48-page scenario and background book
• One 32-page ship book
• 40 full color HoloCube™ miniatures
• 8 laminated ship control cards
• 16 injection molded plastic tilt blocks
• 100 injection molded stacking tiles
• Two 2′ by 3′ geomorphic hex maps

Play

The turn sequence has players plotting ship movement by use of grease pencils or eraseable markers on laminated cards; all movements are plotted simultaneously, as are all fire decisions. Orientation on the map is shown with box miniatures and tilt blocks, with altitude shown by stacking tiles.

The game play focuses on single ship or small unit engagements, as shown in the earlier books in the series. The primary armament is the impeller drive missile using bomb-pumped X-ray laser warheads, and where shoals of missiles are launched at enemy vessels, to be whittled down by the defenses of the target (abstracted as electronic countermeasures, countermissiles, and point defense laser clusters).

The mechanism for “culling the missiles” abstracts down to three die rolls (one for ECM, one for countermissiles, one for point defense lasers), each one knocking out missiles on their way in; ECM knocks out out a percentage of missiles, counter missiles and point defense tell you how many inbounds you shot down.

Whatever makes it past the three layers of defense hits the ship, where a system takes warhead size, target size factor, sidewall strength and a die roll to determine how much damage the missile does. A typical example would be a scale 7 missile (annotated as 7M) hitting a scale 5 target with a sidewall worth -3; the die roll is two 10 sided dice, subtracting the smaller number from the larger (annotated as 2d10-), giving a range from 0 to 9.

Each missile that hits has its entry point rolled on a hit location matrix that has the port and starboard sides of the ship on the top and bottom and fore and aft on the left and right sides. Each damage point moves down the row or column of the matrix, identifying what gets hit; the system is marked on the system damage tracks and combat resumes.

A game can take anywhere from an hour and a half to as many as 4 and a half hours.

The Good

As a fan of the Honorverse, this is a top-notch game which is completely in-line with the novels. As an advanced math and science teacher, it’s also quite full of things that could indeed be very useful in a classroom environment. Ken Burnside designed an absolutely fabulous game which I feel will stand the test of time and become one of the greatest ever in tactical starship combat.

The Bad

The box itself isn’t the best quality, and too much handling will cause the black ink to come right off onto your hands.

The Ugly

None.

Product Summary
Name: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator
Publisher: Ad Astra Games
Game concept: Ken Burnside, Thomas Pope, and David Weber
Category: Boardgame
Cost: $74.95
Year: 2007 (2nd Edition)
SKU: ADA21000
ISBN: 0-9748797-4-6

Rating