South Pacific:
Design Notes
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2026

While I’ve designed a lot of games, probably in the hundreds, I’ve rarely designed one anywhere near as large as Second World War at Sea: South Pacific. We’ve published big games, but none of them were designed by me. The really big ones I’ve designed have never been published, and that’s probably not a coincidence (and likely a good thing).

South Pacific was the last game we put in a box, and we’re highly unlikely to ever use a box again for a game unless we produce somewthing for the mass market. Rising costs, along with storage and shipping issues, had already made an impact before random tariff follies kicked in during the spring of 2025. I almost put a rate in that sentence, but that rate might not be still valid by the time I type the period on this one. And so we switched to our standard Playbook format.

South Pacific contains multitudes of games within that Playbook package. First off, it has both an operational game, taking place on a map of the Solomon Islands and surrounding waters. This is where the task forces and flights of aircraft move and seek each other out. It’s a big fat map, with art by Tiffany Munro. It stretches from the Japanese naval base at Truk up near the top and the Allied base at Nouméa in New Caledonia down near the bottom edge.

And then there’s the tactical game, where the ships fight each other. In South Pacific, most of that happens on the Ironbottom Sound tactical map. It’s pretty much a complete game on its own, as there was plenty of action in Ironbottom Sound (the waters just north of Guadalcanal).

I have this vision for wargame publishing, one that runs counter to our industry’s conventional wisdom. We want our games to be kept, to be played many times, to be enjoyed with expansion sets and scenario books that make them new to you all over again.

South Pacific is designed to be the core of our Second World War at Sea game line, and to be a game that you’ll enjoy and perhaps even treasure. And at the center of that – more than the game play, or the pretty maps, or the fantastic ship art – is the story. The history of the bitterly-fought campaign for the Solomon Islands in 1942.

The scenarios can themselves be very effective storytelling devices if you, as the designer, string them together to show how a battle or campaign developed from stage to stage. This is why I design wargames, and I’ve come to appreciate this approach. In most of our games, the scenarios move the narrative, and tell the story of the campaign. There’s historical text interwoven between them to keep the story moving along. It’s a very effective method, at least in my opinion, and it seems to be popular.

With South Pacific, I ran out of space to tell all of the story that I wished to include. The boxed edition was already stuffed to the very top, and would not accommodate a larger scenario book than the 64 pages already allocated. It’s still a lot of game; at 42 scenarios, South Pacific is already in the optimum scenario-count zone (experience has shown that a scenario count between 35 and 49, whatever the game series, is best-loved by wargamers).

So we have two more expansion books to flesh out the story. I started out intending to write just one, that would add more history and scenarios, but soon ran up againbst the pahe-count limit. So we went with two, doubling the available space. Solomons Naval Campaign is the history book. Ironbottom Sound is the scenario book.

Our naval game series (Great War at Sea and Second World War at Sea, and the upcoming Cold War at Sea and Ironclads) have two very distinct scenario types, operational and battle. Operational scenarios take place on the operational map, and may or may not includes battles waged on the tactical map. Battle scenarios take place on the tactical map, skipping the whole fleets-moving-and-searching part.

For a long time, I just didn’t see the storytelling potential involved in this split, but it’s at the heart of how South Pacific (and other games like Bismarck) is put together. The battle scenario helps highlight the key moments in the operational scenario, and lets you, the designer, tell more of the story by showing rather than just telling why this was a crucial moment.

And that’s why South Pacific has a lot of battle scenarios (well, that, and it would have been sinful to include that wonderful Ironbottom Sound tactical map without using it as often as possible). Every operational scenario has at least one battle scenario to go along with it; some of them have more than one (and one has many more than one, but that’s an outlier).

The earliest Second World War at Sea games only had a few battle scenarios, limited to the battles that actually took place (which wasn’t very many – outside of the campaign portrayed in South Pacific, there was not a lot of surface combat in the Second World War at sea). But that’s not really good history – to tell the full story, the game needs to include the battles that were likely to arise from the operations, or that the participants thought likely to take place.

We also take a serious look at the possibilities of other ships that were nearby but not committed getting involved in the action. On the American side, theater commander Robert Ghormley understandably turned out to be rather timid about sending his heavy units into the waters off Guadalcanal following the shocking defeat at Savo Island with the loss of four heavy cruisers in a single night against no Japanese losses. Later, Pacific commander-in-chief Chester Nimitz became reluctant to commit his battleships to surface action even after the fuel shortage in the area, his initial excuse, had abated.

The Japanese, for their part, operated under an Imperial Navy corporate culture that practically demanded hyper-complex plans and piecemeal commitment of forces. Where American culture emphasized maximum concentration, the Japanese sought maximum utility: employing just enough to accomplish the mission, and seeking to fulfill many goals with the same resources. Throughout most of the campaign the Japanese had a significant superiority in surface firepower, but continued to fight the Americans at even odds while other ships swung at anchor in Truk Lagoon. In a game like South Pacific, we can look at how the commitment of Hotel Yamato to the actual fighting rather than service as a floating office complex might have affected the campaign. That also lets us put the Japanese super-battleship on the Ironbottom Sound map to square off with Washington and South Dakota.

We stuffed South Pacific with fun things. And then we added more, with Ironbottom Sound and Solomons Naval Campaign. South Pacific is a big game, and frankly, it’s an expensive game. We’ve done everything we can to make it worth your money and your time, and expanded the game so you can keep playing and enjoying it. A game this splendid should be played and cherished for many, many years.

Order South Pacific Here.

Order Ironbottom Sound Here.
Includes Solomons Naval Campaign book.

Order Solomons Naval Campaign Here.
Companion piece to Ironbottom Sound, or just read it separately.

Tales of the South Pacific
• South Pacific
• Ironbottom Sound
• Solomons Naval Campaign
Retail Price: $236.98
Package Price: $200
Gold Price: $160

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children.

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