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I've been playtesting an island hopping format, and have grown to like it a lot. It's much more balanced between the various vessel types than playing for objectives, and is well suited for low point games.

Island Hopping
In this format, both sides attempt to gain control of all the islands, of which there are four on the map. (Use Battle Map 01 with the island adjacent to the "red" player's deployment area two rows toward the center of the map and the "big island" reduced to one sector on the center row.) The player that gains control of all four islands wins.


In the picture I am using one Akitsuki as a Kinai Maru stand-in.

To play this format you will need all normal items plus:

[LIST]
[*]Six transport ships, three for each side
[*]Eight flags, four for each nation
[*]Six colored tokens, three for each side
[/LIST]

I myself simply use the Kinai Maru and SS Jeremiah O'Brien with drawn flags for Japan and the US with red and blue colored pieces of paper. You simply need markers of some sort.

Each has a total of three transports at all times. Transports do not count against the limit of ships in a sector. If a transport is sunk, deploy it on the edge of its owner's side of the map. Additionally, each side has three troop tokens, which can be carried by a transport. If a troop token is destroyed, its player may place one on the edge of that player's side of the map to be picked up by a transport. Troop tokens may be unloaded on islands by adjacent transports, or loaded onto adjacent transports from islands. Transports load or unload at the end of the movement phase, and can only load or unload once per turn.

When troops tokens from the two different players are on the same island, each player rolls a die and re-rolling on a tie. The player with the lower number loses a troop token.

When a player has a troop token on an island with no rival troop tokens on it, that player then controls the island and may put their flag on the island.

In the event that a player has no non-transport surface ships left, the game is over and the player with more islands controlled wins, with a +1 bonus for the player(s) who still have at least one surface ship left.

Jolly-Roger wrote:

1) Can you put more than one army on an island? For example, my buddy placed two on one and I placed two on one island. We rolled one time for each army...is that right?

You can have as many armies on an island as you like. You roll until only one player has armies left on the island. Thus if both players have 2 armies on one island, you roll until one player has lost both armies.

Jolly-Roger wrote:

2)When can the transports load and unload? Since the islands are only 1 square apart, since I won initiative I loaded, moved and unloaded my army all in the movement phase. This seems broken, since you can do a lot of actions in one phase. Perhaps some rules on what phase you can load etc?

You can load or unload at the end of the movement phase, and each transport can only load or unload once per turn. I should have made that clear. Thanks for pointing it out.

Jolly-Roger wrote:

3) When te transports are floating about, do you have to display which ships are carrying your army? I assume so based on the picture, but just wanted to clarify.

Yes. You need to show which transports are carrying troops.

Thanks for giving me feedback on the format! How long did your games take you, by the way? Some of mine have been a bit longer than I would like. Maybe it should be reduced to three islands.

This seems REALLY cool. I will be testing this out very soon.

If Arcos wants, he can participate in the Olympics with it. There is currently a contest in the creativity challenge of the forumini for the best WAS variant.