Finished a solitaire game of Hobby Japan's Malaya/Burma on the weekend. 
The Japanese failed to make it all the way to Singapore at game's end but 
probably would have been at least ready to assault it within a turn or 
two. At this point I clearly have not sufficient information about balance 
to judge (and I know I played some rules wrong partway through the game), 
but I liked what I saw.  This is a fairly well-known collector's item that 
has not seen a re-release like some other Hobby Japan stuff (in particular 
Pacific Fleet, an excellent game).  It was actually hard to find opinions 
of it, so I never paid much attention to it until I found myself with some 
other Burma games last year and wanted to compare, so I went after a copy. 
The components are OK - think Victory Games. Would have been colourful in 
the 1980s but look rather unprepossessing now; the air maps are a little 
plain. However, all quite functional.

The sequence of play has an air phase where first one side, then the other 
flies missions (the order is determined by dieroll), then the Japanese 
move and fight, and then the British move and fight. The game has an 
unusual combat model in that in each player turn, there are three rounds 
of combat, any of which the attacker can leave out if he so chooses. After 
each round, there is a retreat and advance phase.  At first glance, the 
CRT is one of those largely bloodless ones (it has only morale checks and 
"hits" but you can take any hit result as a retreat instead of a step 
loss) which I normally dread because they tend to produce really wacky 
tactics.  (And in the S&T Singapore game, which I really liked and played 
a lot, it proved to be the game's undoing as far as I'm concerned since we 
found a good Commonwealth player can always shut down the Japanese with a 
"carpet" defense in depth.)

However, it turns out to be not so.  The trick is that (a) retreating is 
dangerous - you roll a die and on a 6 take a step loss; retreating into 
roadless terrain, over rivers, or through ZOCs each provides a dieroll 
modifier; (b) failing a morale check costs you a step; (c) the game 
distinguishes between combat (inf and armor) and support units (arty, 
engineers, AT and AA), and if all combat units in a stack die for whatever 
reason, the support units also die.  So a "two morale check, two hits" 
result may well see a five unit stack formed around a couple of weakened 
infantry units evaporating as both fail their morale and then lose steps 
in the multiple retreat dierolls.  Makes for a bit of extra dierolling, 
but gives a good narrative and teaches you that sometimes it's better to 
sit and take the damage. This is one of the few games that enable you to 
really see "a retreat turning into a rout".

However, another wrinkle, this time in favour of the defender, is that the 
advance after combat is not automatic.  If you attack in one round and the 
other side retreats and you fail your advance dierolls, the defender may 
break contact and you will not be able to use the second combat round. In 
the first round, the attacker cannot use artillery, and artillery cannot 
advance at all, so if you attack right away and push the other side out of 
its position, you will not be able to bring your artillery to bear at all. 
(Conversely, if you advance after the second round, your artillery again 
will not be able to advance and probably won't participate in the third 
round.) What does that mean? Well, in play you will find that this is 
actually a rather elegant way of having a distinction between hasty 
attacks (if you attack in the first round), prepared or follow-on attacks 
(if you attack in the second), and exploitation if you manage to stay in 
contact and attack in the third.  Clever!  It also means that if the 
defender tries to make stand and fails he might be bowled back four or 
five hexes in a single combat phase, depending on how combat and the 
Japanese advance dice work out.  The Japanese (the usual attackers, of 
course) on the other side have the problem that loss results can turn up 
even at high odds and rolls - if you try to conserve your force by 
retreating after a failed attack, you will lose contact and the chance to 
push further in the other combat rounds.

The CRT itself is differential-based (like the S&T Singapore one) but 
seems to work fine;  the dieroll modifier based on the morale difference 
is typically as important as the strength difference, and can increase 
based on the presence of support units.  If you attack with infantry, 
tanks, engineers, and a flanking amphibious assault (each a +1 to your 
morale) you can get quite boost. The effect of ground support aircraft is 
to reduce enemy morale by 1.

ZOCs are flexible, you simply pay 1MP to enter and exit them (and 
therefore +2 for infiltrating from one to the other).  You can double your 
movement allowance if you stay out of ZOCs the whole turn.  This is one 
aspect I'm not quite sure about at this point - all units have a movement 
allowance of 5 and that means that if the CW player falls back five hexes 
per turn, he will actually make it almost impossible for the Japanese to 
come to grips with him until very late in the game.  On the other hand he 
will have run out of retreat space and the multi-round combat system can 
be quite ferocious in such situations.  We'll see.

Apart from combat, the other (and probably most famous) special aspect of 
the game is its detailed handling of air operations.  There is a separate 
map with megahexes showing the airbases and on which you place planes as 
they fly missions.  (The megahexes are about 100nm in diameter which gives 
some ideas as to how this game could be tied into the Solomon Sea system.)

Missions include bombing of airfields, bombing of convoys, ground support 
and of course escort and interception missions for fighters.  I found 
combat to be rather unbloody in terms of outright elimination (we are 
talking squadron counters in a game where turns are multiple days so this 
is fine).  Typically what happens is that a unit is disrupted which is a 
hard state to get out of, so they hang around for a long time doing 
nothing and if you manage to bomb the airfield and disrupt them again, 
they are eliminated.  The air game is interesting in that the Japanese 
have to slowly leapfrog to airfields in Malaya to stay within range of the 
advancing front, and it seems at this point that judicious use of their 
planes gives the CW forces the ability to stay in the game until near the 
end. (Since as the Japanese side, I focused on protecting my bombers over 
Malay, as the CW player I even managed to plant some torpedoes in Japanese 
transports using the Vildebeest units...)

Squadrons show the unit type (the arrival of the Hurricane squadrons is a 
relief) and there's also a B-17 flying in from Surabaya, although 
typically it will only be available for one turn.

The main drawback of the game that I see, and I consider it minor, are the 
translated rules.  They are set in a fixed width font that is hard to read 
and they are unnecessarily hard to use as a reference since the rules 
include, for unfathomable reasons, a basic and advanced airgame.  The 
basic air saves about 1/3 of the air counters and a single counter rating 
but the advanced game is not actually that complex and I used it from the 
start. In fact some of the combat resolution is simpler. They could just 
have left out the basic game.

So, as a Malaya game, with the caveat of limited experience, it seems to 
work fine.  Not only that but at this point I like it best among the 
Malaya games I've played.  I'm not sure if it's Singapore done right but 
it's definitely Singapore done better.  I hope that holds up and I look 
forward to trying it out on Burma.  The air game there (with Lysander 
squadrons for ground support!) promises to be interesting.

Markus

Last 3 games played: Talavera, Red Sun-Red Star, Malaya/Burma
--------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ ---------------
"Bakayaro! Bakayaro!"  ("Stupid Bastards!  Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral 
Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942

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