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Refight the 1905 Russo-Japanese war at sea in Port Arthur, a vibrant and fast moving two player naval strategy game.
Play as Japan and attempt to amphibiously land your armies in Manchuria and bloody the nose of the Imperial Russian Navy. Or play as Russia, far from home, battling to prevent Japanese landings until reinforcements can arrive.
Game play is quick and tense as you use your naval forces to mount sorties against the enemy and gain dominance of the naval zones that surround Japan. Each turn is rich in tough decision making. Success in combat hinges on how much risk you are prepared to take, based on the variable speed and gunnery skills of the ships involved.
Port Arthur is the second game on the Combat Rations series, following on from the extremely popular 300: Earth & Fire. Like all Combat Rations games it is quick playing, easy to learn, with a small footprint and high quality art and components.
Will history repeat itself, with the Japanese sending the Russian Baltic Fleet to the bottom of the ocean? Or will the Russians avert disaster and win the day? You decide.
- Introduces new players to wargames
- Fast playtime
- Cool design, great artwork and map
- Russo-Japanese War, naval battle of Tsushima
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Naval combat — Focuses specifically on the naval battle of Tsushima.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It's checking off a lot of boxes for me and that it's solitire, individual man, campaign, strong narrative elements, events.
- I love to see new games, new companies popping up and see newcomers into the field. It only helps us have more creativity, more innovation, and more people pushing the edge of the design envelope.
- This is a new and interesting direction for them.
- This is a lot of fun. I think it's going to spin great narratives.
- My understanding of World War I combat of course listening to him went up through the roof.
- And this game focuses on the reconnaissance at Verdon as the part of the combat.
- Warfare traditionally was a situation especially as you go farther back in time where you didn't have anywhere close to full information and getting that information and what you did with that information and analyzing that information and making decisions on incomplete information was such a huge part of warfare that really hasn't been captured in a lot of our modern wargaming experience.