New Team Game--Tarawa (Proud and Few)

[Marc Bellizzi]

HOUSE RULES

Normally I dislike house rules but due to game mechanics issues, I had to make a few.

1. - No landing craft may cross the reef into shallow water hexes. For some reason the LCVP's can cross into the shallow area; due to a 'neap tide' on 20 Nov 1943, the water over the reef was less than 3 feet deep; the LCVP required a minimum of 4 feet draught. In some areas, the reef was totally exposed (represented by a string of 'sand' hexes away from the island). The USMC player must unload his LCVPs and LCMs at the reef (or onto the lone paved hex at the end of the pier). This rule does not pertain to the LVT (amtrac) vehicles.

2. - On turn 1 the USMC player has 4 'available' at-start 5-inch naval gunfire missions; each fire mission has 10 rounds. These are to fire SMOKE ONLY. If they are not used, they are lost (the 'call' time on them is set to 101 turns minimum). Turn 1 is the only turn the USMC player has any fire restriction; after turn 1 he may fire his other support missions however he wishes (there are 160 smoke rounds total, minus the 40 used on turn 1 still leaves a heck of a lot of smoke). Historically the NGF support was called off 20 minutes too early, allowing the dazed Japanese survivors to start to re-occupy their defenses with deadly results.

3. - To help facilitate the SMOKE SCREEN for turn 1, an assault boat with 2 NGF spotters is available in the upper right map area to call for fire; this group is removed on turn 2 and the USMC player then must rely on the spotters and leaders in his landing force.

4. - Once the USMC player unloads his LCMs and LCVPs he should move them back to the north map-edge and then 'remove them from play'. Historically there was a shortage of landing craft and they were needed to ferry additional waves to the reef. Additionally if they are just left along the reef the Japanese player can target & eventually destroy the landing craft causing the VPs to skew too much to the Japanese side. The mass of troops wading in to the shore block the LCVPs from using their 2x machine guns for most of the scenario, so there really is no benefit to leaving them on map. Please note that I am not requiring the landing craft to dump everyone out at once; however once a landing craft is empty, the US side should move them to the map edge and out of the game.