'Tiger of Malaya': Developer's Notes
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2007

Tiger of Malaya is actually one of the oldest games in our inventory, its design stretching back to the early 1990s when Brian Knipple worked for me at another, mercifully long-forgotten wargame publisher. He’d concocted a game system to model differences between two sides’ supply and command-and-control situations by limiting and randomizing their chances of conducting operations. Each had a set of “impulse chits,” each of those in turn indicating one type of “impulse” (a set of actions) that player could undertake with his or her units. A FULL impulse let them move, attack and do whatever else the game allowed; a MOVE impulse, for example, only let them move their units but they could not attack with them.

Brian designed a trio of games with the system, one he called Leyte 1944, one called Arakan, and one called Grim Glory. The Leyte game seemed the best of the lot and was the only one involving American forces (always an important marketing point) so we released it in 1994 as one of our first games, under the title MacArthur’s Return. Arakan became our misbegotten Operation Cannibal, and I’ve told its sorry tale elsewhere.

The Grim Glory game covered the Japanese assault on the southern end of the Malayan peninsula and the island of Singapore in early 1942. His title comes from a chapter heading in the Australian official history of the campaign, but it doesn’t relate to the subject at all. Tiger of Malaya, though it does invoke a Japanese general’s nickname, seemed a much better handle. It was originally going to be a 1996 release, but then things happened. Even though it was by far the best game of the three, Tiger of Malaya was put aside. When we started our Classic Wargames program, Tiger of Malaya was a natural choice, though smaller than the other initial offerings.

So now that it finally exists, what do you get in the box?

The game has 560 pieces, by Susan Robinson, and one 35x24-inch map, by Beth Donahue. For the first time, we went with fully-illustrated setup cards for all four of the scenarios and for each side’s reinforcements, with pictures of the pieces and indicators of where they go. If this feature proves as popular as we think it will, we’ll be using it more often in other games.

The strategic situation is tense in all the scenarios, which differ as to length and start and end dates. The map covers Johore Province and Singapore Island. It does not include the fighting in northern and central Malaya, where the Japanese bundled the Allies southward fairly easily — a spectacular Japanese victory, but not all that interesting for an Allied player. Rather, it concentrates on the final weeks of the campaign where resistance stiffened and where the Allied command had planned to make their main effort once their misbegotten effort to crush the Japanese landings in Thailand failed miserably.

The system’s been used successfully in several of our games, all of them now out of print. Each player places his or her “impulse chits” in an opaque container, and they’re drawn out randomly, meaning there’s no telling who might get to move next. The Japanese player has more chits and they generally allow him or her to do more things. The Allied player is also hampered by a special rule allowing only a company of tough Malay commandos to voluntarily move out of supply range.

Units need to be in supply to function fully, and this is traced through headquarters (division and brigade/regiment). Some units are “jungle capable,” which reflects a greater degree of adaptability, small unit leadership and cohesion rather than special training — the Japanese divisions had not been through any special jungle schooling, just hard peacetime drilling, while some of the “jungle capable” Australians are arriving directly from the sands of Egypt. Jungle-capable units move faster through the jungle.

Combat is odds-based, with a table giving different results depending on the terrain occupied by the defender. There are bonuses for envelopment (attacking from at least four hexes) and tanks. Artillery can provide support for attackers or defenders, but is generally more effective on the attack. It can also bombard enemy units, without the assistance of friendly ground units.

Both sides have steamers that can quickly transport a handful of units along either coast or up one of the numerous rivers. The Japanese have aircraft, which can assist attckers or disrupt Allied communications. And the Japanese will find their tanks very useful, as the Allies have very few unless reinforcements arrive.

The Allies have the remnants of the two divisions that fought in the north, 11th and 9th Indian Divisions. Their battalions are weak, some have been consolidated because of heavy casualties, and they have lost a good part of their artillery. But that’s no reason for the Allied player to despair. The third Allied division present on the peninsula when the Japanese attacked, 8th Australian, was not sent northward and is intact. It had only two brigades but it is jungle-capable and a tough, well-trained and -equipped outfit able to stand up to the Japanese on a unit-by-unit basis. But it does not have nearly enough units.

The Allied player’s goal is to hold out as long as possible, not simply to lose less spectacularly than his or her historical counterpart, but to keep Singapore in British hands long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The first formations to show up help only a little: The British 18th Division is untrained and untested, as are the raw Indian battalions that arrive as well. But if Singapore holds out long enough, the reinforcements are powerful indeed: the desert-tested 7th Australian Division, one of the war’s hardest-fighting units, and the 7th “Desert Rats” Armoured Brigade. The latter gives the Allies parity with the Japanese in terms of numbers of tanks, but as it can be deployed in a concentrated mass (usually together with the Australians) it can have an effect out of proportion to its numbers. Additionally, 8th Division’s third brigade will eventually straggle in. With these forces the Australians have a good chance of repeating their glorious stand at Tobruk.

The Japanese face an arduous task, fighting their way through tough terrain (though Malaya had vast acreages of rubber plantations, in game terms these are no different from low-density jungle) to then assault Singapore. Though termed a “fortress” by the British high command, Singapore lacked conventional fortifications against landward assault. The Johore Strait is a formidable barrier that the Japanese can cross only with the help of boat engineers, and Allied units can construct field fortifications that help somewhat. Singapore does have big naval guns that can indeed fire to the landward side but have rather low values to go with their great range, as they lacked high-explosive ammunition.

The “Tiger of Malaya” wields three divisions. The two that start most scenarios are excellent pre-war regular formations, the 18th “Chrysanthemum” and 5th Infantry Divisions. The Imperial Guard arrives as a reinforcement, but this palace ceremonial unit is not as skilled as the regulars. If 7th Australian Division arrives for the Allies, the Japanese command will release two regiments and some support units of the 56th Infantry Division to counter it.

“Land war in Asia” is a tough sell and I think we made the right choice in taking this game off the schedule back in the previous century, but I’m very glad we’ve been able to present it now. It plays very well, it gives both players lots of action and the opportunity to attack, and it’s been played excessively over the last decade and a half and so is very smooth.

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