“TARAWA 1943” is a solitaire, card driven wargame on the invasion of Japanese controlled Tarawa by the 2nd Marine Division in November 1943. Each turn the USMC player will activate one of his battalions (there are 8 in the game) and can move, attack, and attempt to regroup. The action can be augmented by the play of the Card. After that, the bot (Imperial Japanese Army) will draw its card and conduct the turn.
The game will give the historical starting invasion site, however, it also have included the alternate “south beach” landing possibility, that the Japanese had expected and prepared. Victory is achieved by taking the island as quickly as possible while minimizing casualties. This was the first invasion of the US island hopping strategy and high losses or a prolonged fight could have led to a cancellation of the island hopping campaign.
For today am am doing short unboxing and presentation of components:
Session reports will follow soon! Stay tuned!
The Boardgames Chronicle 
Great! I recently played this cool game half a dozen times (no wins, all major disasters!). I really like the Combat system, but the victory conditions are absolutely murderous. Extremely difficult to win because of the 2VP per US Casualty the Japanese side gets. I found a way to mitigate this somewhat, while keeping the game a hard challenge: Use all 30 Japanese cards instead of only 24. Do the same with the US card deck if still too hard a contest for you. 🙂
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Interesting variant with the cards. I play it already multiple times and only once – minimally and thanks to good rolls I think – managed to win (one of Banzai attacks completely obliterated itself, 3x 1’s)
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