Empire of the Sun: The Pacific War 1941-1945 is published by GMT Games and designed by Mark Herman. It is, quite simply, one of the landmark card-driven wargames of our hobby and the standard treatment of the entire Pacific theater in a single box. Two players take the roles of the Allied and Japanese supreme commanders, and the whole design revolves around a card-driven system in which cards are not just events but the mechanism for activating headquarters and projecting operations across enormous distances. That is what makes it so distinctive: you are not moving units, you are issuing orders through a command structure that is always stretched too thin.
The game covers the war from Pearl Harbor through to 1945, with scenarios letting you play individual years or the full campaign, and it captures the things that actually decided the Pacific: intelligence and the fog surrounding enemy intentions, the reaction of the defender to an offensive that has been detected, logistics and the ranges at which air and naval power can be sustained, and the political pressure that constrains both sides. Combat mixes air, naval, and ground elements in one integrated resolution, and the intelligence rules mean that a well-planned offensive can be met and shattered before it lands. It is not a light game and it demands attention, but the reward is a strategic picture of the Pacific war that very few designs come close to matching.
Mark Herman is one of those designers whose games keep coming back to my table year after year. His Pacific War is a monster I keep returning to, Churchill is probably my favorite game about the politics of coalition warfare, and Empire of the Sun itself has appeared on the blog many times, with everything collected under my Empire of the Sun tag. If you want to understand how one designer can approach the same war at three completely different scales, that is a very good place to start.
Below I am presenting the game components, giving also a quick overview of the rules and key design features:
Enjoy the material!