Day two was a marathon of a scenario, 40 turns, over 100 units, air support and the dreaded jungle disorientation rules in effect, now I know why other players skipped over this battle. With that said this was a good scenario to play, challenging with the disorientation rules and made interesting with the hidden reinforcements, you might need all 40 of those turns.

To add some uncertainty to playing the game solo, wrote down four entre areas for the hidden Japanese reinforcements to enter the map prior to Aussie set up. At the correct time put them in a hat to randomly draw where they would enter the game. While on the board used numbered counters to represent the hidden units and put the actual units in a container hidden from view until they were revealed, because I did this these numbered counters moved on the board as a single unit while hidden, but once spotted they moved as normal, did it this way because of jungle disorientation.

The battle was pretty much a stalemate early on, the Aussie forces had a good defensive line astride the trail between the two ridges and were able to hold off the Japanese advancing down the track. The follow up Japanese units moved off west into the jungle to try and take the 60m hill hexes, lucky for them the trail was only 1 hex from the first ridge line, a slight flaw in the Aussie defensive plans.

Two companies of the hidden Japanese reinforcements entered on the south edge of the map near the trail and worked their way north until the found the rear of the Australians lines, several Aussie platoons fought a gallant fight but eventually succumbed to superior enemy forces.

Meanwhile the other hidden forces wondered around the 60m ridge for most of the game trying to find the rear of the Australians lines, several platoons did manage to get into the fight late in the game and helped clear the ridge of enemy forces.

Once again the Japanese forces showed that they were masters in close assault, provided that they survived the OP Fire just to get next to an enemy hex and to survive first fire once they initiated an assault. Their high morale was a huge advantage as many units shrugged off any morale checks even if they were M1 or M2.

Australian forces defending the 80m ridge to the east did not see much if any fighting, only four Japanese platoons managed to find their way thru the jungle to threaten those ridge hexes and those that did payed a heavy price.

Allied air support was sporadic at best, for the most part it did not show up, if it did it missed the target and if it did hit only caused a few units to be disrupted which had minimal effect on the Japanese advance, only causing the player to roll more morale checks.

All in all fun scenario to play, the outcome was not one sided, victory for the Japanese was not decided until close to the end of the scenario, but the game felt like I was in Vegas playing craps!