I picked this scenario at random. Since I hadn't played Kokoda Campaign, or any jungle battle I figured this was the time.

Before I started, I took to Youtube to get a little more history of this campaign. To my surprise, this is a very honored campaign among the Australian country today. I saw some video of the survivors of the campaign explaining the appalling conditions they fought in and how they were fighting not just for themselves, but Australia too. Also some color video of the trail and the absolutely incredible jungle and mountain terrain. Quite different from my usual interests.

I would recommend doing something similar if you play this game as it really shows you what it was like and helps to draw you in to the game.

Jungle warfare in PG hasn't seemed too thrilling to me so far. This little scenario opened my eyes to doing more of this in the future.

Disorientation works great for solo play and you can handle hidden units easily.

In this small scenario, the Australians are finishing off the Japanese on a nearby island. They are trying to kill as many as possible and run them off the high ground. The Japanese want to do the same except hold the high ground.

The Aussies set up on the beach in a line to move up the hill on a broad front to the top. The Japanese set up in 4 groups hidden to try and get an ambush on the Aussies. Not enough of them to cover much ground so they needed some luck.

With disorientation movement it was very hard to keep going the direction needed. Therefore it was hard for the Japanese to set up ambushes as the Aussies might zigzag anywhere. When the hidden units tried to move to get in better ambush position then they were also disoriented so couldn't go where they wanted.

This modeled jungle combat well as I figured on this island neither side probably knew much about where they were going.

The Aussies had very high initiative and more numbers. The Japanese have great morale 9/8 and that extra +1 assault bonus.

They also rolled very high and low on the table several times which inflicted many casualties.

There was no way the Aussies could keep a cohesive line, but 4 platoons did make it to the 80M hill hexes. The Japanese strategy wasn't the greatest as they tried laying in wait a few hexes from the top and planning to fall back to the 80M hexes. Disorientation took care of that. They managed to knock out 7 steps of Aussie platoons, but only having 1 80M hill hex. The Aussies knocked out 3 steps to go with the aforementioned 4 hexes. 8-7 Japan which is a draw.

If the Japanese would have just waited at the top hidden for the Aussies to come up and ambushed anyone who made it up, they probably would have won.

This was my first PG game, it took awhile to finish all the scenarios but I did enjoy this playing this game. Chose this campaign because it was different, it was a campaign that I have read about but have not seen in game form before, thought it would be interesting game to stick my toe into the PG pond. It is not as sexy as some of the other games in the PG Universe but it did an excellent job of teaching me the game system, would recommend it for new players.

Early on in the campaign the Japanese are excellent in assault combat, the modifiers they get make them tough to beat. One thing this game taught me was the importance of good leaders, more than one scenario was decided on a good leader with combat & morale modifiers helping his units deny an objective to the enemy, there were many scenarios that went down to the wire, the last turn, the last activation that made this game and the game system enjoyable to play.

Author	treadasaurusrex (Australia)
Method	VASSAL
Victor	Australia
Participants	Reconquista
Play Date	2024-07-09
Language	English
Scenario	KoCa030

Others had detailed this one in detail. This was a straightforward, infantry-in-the-jungle slugfest that was not much fun to play, since you end up fighting the environment as much as your opponent. We completed this one in 5, generally frustrating, sessions and did not use the FOW rule.

This time, the Australian got a victory by simply pushing the Japanese back and off the dominant terrain.

This one is probably better to play in SOLO mode. I give it a generous ratiing of 3 in shared play.