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Home > Products > Bitterest Day: The Battle for Sugar Loaf Hill: Okinawa, Japan, May 1945

07.2024 Bitterest Day: The Battle for Sugar Loaf Hill: Okinawa, Japan, May 1945

Publisher/Date:
Bounding Fire Productions (2024)

Product Type:
HASL/Historical Module

Country of Origin:
United States

Contents:
27" x 35" historical map, 9 scenarios, 1 campaign game (with 6 CG dates), 1 countersheet (with 180 die-cut 1/2" counters and 64 die-cut 5/8" counters), 4 sheets play aids/charts/dividers, 20 pages rules.

Commentary:

Bitterest Day is a historical module published by Bounding Fire Productions simulating the difficult, week-long effort by the Sixth Marine Division to take Sugar Loaf Hill and vicinity on Okinawa in May 1945. This bitter battle for a sweetly-named hill was emblematic of the difficulties faced by U.S. Army and Marines forces to capture Okinawa, as the Japanese forces were numerous, determined, and decidedly entrenched in caves and fortifications.  Bitterest Day was designed by Michigan ASLer Chad VanDerBos, who–if memory serves–was himself once a member of the USMC. I believe this is his first design.

Okinawa is not a subject gamed all that often in ASL, despite the fact that it was one of the largest and longest campaigns in the Pacific War.  The reason, perhaps, is the likely necessity of caves and fortifications.  There are Okinawa scenarios in various products, plus three historical modules.  Ordeal Before Shuri, an early Critical Hit product, came out in 1999 (25 years ago, as of the time of this writing), featuring actions of the 27th and 96th Infantry Divisions and including a 48-date Campaign Game (this seems pretty unworkable; even the longest Red Factories campaign game is only 30 dates). The product must not have been very popular, as it remains one of the very few Critical Hit products never to have been reprinted. Critical Hit produced a second Okinawa-themed module several years later, Item Pocket, which was a sort of sequel to Ordeal and designed by the same person. It had no campaign games, only (mostly small) scenarios. It only saw a single reprinting. Finally, MMP also published an Okinawa-themed historical item in the early 2000s, including a mini-HASL, Kakazu Ridge, within ASL Journal Issue Two.  This product included a historical map and four scenarios but no campaign game. Thus it has been more than 20 years since there has been a historical module featuring Okinawa and none that featured a playable campaign game. Until now.

The centerpiece of Bitterest Day is its historical map, a large (and large-hexed) 27″ x 35″ map, featuring a 28 x 36 hex hexgrid. The map is printed on thick, matte paper with muted tones. The graphics, largely dictated by the terrain, are fairly plain and utilitarian, but there is nothing to complain about them. The battleground depicted features Sugar Loaf Hill and the  surrounding hills and valleys; it is fairly open terrain terrain; don’t expect jungles here (there are a few rice paddies).  As in Kakazu Ridge, cave complex areas are depicted on the map with dotted lines; much of Bitterest Day is not about what you see on the map but what lies hidden in the hands of the Japanese player.  The terrain ranges from -2 to +4 in elevation, and has a railroad curving along the middle of the map area.  The only real complaint about the map is in its folding: the map is folded such that a two-inch strip along one edge has a fold in it, which means it will be very difficult to keep flat unless put under plexiglass or equivalent. This was one so that the product could fit in shrinkwrap the size of an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper. It would have been better simply to have had a larger back and front cover sheet that would have enabled the map to be folded fewer times. Because the product comes in shrinkwrap, you’ll have to get a ziplock bag or some other way to store it.

Bitterest Day comes with one countersheet of mixed 1/2″ and 5/8″ counters. A bit over half of them provide counters for the campaign game, or extra caves (illustrating just how many caves there might be in this baby). The sheet also provides some extra Japanese 4-4-7 squads (always handy), some extra USMC 7-6-8 squads, and some 5-5-8 USMC squads/half-squads with assault engineer markings. There are also some U.S. AFVs and some historical aircraft. As is typical with BFP counters, they are nicely done and of high quality.

The product comes with 9 scenarios, which feature American attacks in 7 of them (historically, there were numerous Japanese counterattacks, so this is perhaps a bit unbalanced ratio, although of course overall the Americans were the ones with the initiative.  Given the nature of the battle as well as the well-deserved reputation that BFP has for a fixation on fortifications, you might think that the scenarios in Bitterest Day would be chock full of wire, mines, pillboxes, trenches, foxholes, caves, and every other possible thing under the sun, but that in fact is refreshingly not the case.  Although the scenarios here are similar to typical BFP scenarios in that they tend to feature very straightforward (even unimaginative) set-ups and reinforcements and rarely have anything even resembling “color” rules designed to simulate unique aspects of various actions, they are dissimilar in that they tend to be smaller, leaner, and less dependent on scads of fortifications than many other BFP products.  Make no mistake:  every scenario here has at least some fortifications, and every one has caves. But they have very manageable amounts of them. In the designer’s notes, Chad VanDerBos wrote that he hoped the product would serve “as a decent introduction to cave rules,” and one would have to agree: playing some of the scenarios here can be a very good way to learn about ASL caves.

Most of the scenarios of Bitterest Day are medium in size, and quite manageable; there are also a couple small scenarios and a couple of larger ones, including one (barely) monster-sized scenario, BD-6 (Bitterest Day), which uses the entire map and pits some 33 USMC squad and 10 AFVs against 24 Japanese squads with 3 guns and 26 caves; both sides also get purchasable reinforcements. However, that scenario is the exception rather than the rule.  Most scenarios are much smaller–and, because they typically have few SSRs, can be leapt into pretty easily.  Three scenarios have OBA; no scenarios utilize Air Support. No scenarios use Night rules, either, although one scenario (and possibly another) take place at night; instead, a couple of SSRs substitute for the cumbersome collection of Night rules.  Tankies can breathe a sigh of relief, as all but one of the scenarios feature AFVs (and yes, there are flame-throwing tanks).

All in all, the scenarios are more manageable and playable that was expected for this product prior to publication–which is a good thing.

The campaign game, dubbed simply “Sugar Loaf,” is also manageable, with 6 campaign game dates. There are 20 pages of rules, but most of these are simply the standard refit/reinforcement/etc. rules that every campaign game has. Beyond these, there are only two pages of rules, most of which relate to the terrain on the map. One significant new terrain type is introduced, the “Broken Hillside” hex, which is a crestline hex that apparently has undulations, mini-ravines, and other features of broken-ground that both provide a little bit of defensive value as well as make the slope somewhat easier to climb. It’s pretty simple. Both sides have a pretty reasonable amount of reinforcement options for purchase in the campaign game.

Though time will have to tell to see how well the scenarios are balanced, Bitterest Day does look like a solid product. ASLers who have yet to dip a toe into the cold but inviting waters of the Cave rules might find this product a perfect excuse to test them out.

 

 

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Tagged: Advanced, Campaign Game(s), Historical Map(s), Monster Historical Scenario, PTO-Oriented, Third Party Counters (Not CH)

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