First Blood: The Guadalcanal Campaign

This is a module of The Avalon Hill Intercontinental Kriegspiel Society’s game First Blood - The Guadacanal Campaign. The original game as published in Kommandeur Vol. 26, No. 6 in 1991, and has since been made available from grognard.com.

Overview

The module is available in two colour themes

• Colourful which has units coloured in navy blue for US troops, and with Crimson symbol background for USMC units, and black symbol background for US-Army units, and IJA units with yellow background. The map is colourised.
• Ol’School which is closer to the original published colour scheme with units using NATO colours (baby-blue for “friendly” US units, baby-pink for “hostile” Japanese units).

The modules has a number of features to ease game-play.

• Use the turn track in the menu bar. It implements some automatic actions, and progresses the turn marker along the turn track.
• The rules are available, as a PDF, through the Help menu.
• See also More information in the Help menu.
• Run the tutorial (or watch the Video)
• Use Ctrl-X to declare combats, Ctrl-Y to resolve them.
• Automatised actions can be disabled in the games Preferences tab.

Implementation

This module is based on my version of the game (sources available from this site). This version a revamp of the original, including new text and graphics, written in LᴬTₑX using wargame package. This package supports generating a (draft) VASSAL module from the same sources as the Print’n’Play PDF.

Resources

• BoardGameGeek page
• Print’n’Play PDF version is available from BoardGameGeek
• GitLab repository
  • The (LᴬTₑX) sources of the Print’n’Play version
  • The (LᴬTₑX & Python) sources of the VASSAL module
  • The most up-to-date Print’n’Play PDF
    • Including various print (A4 & Letter, booklets) options
  • The most up-to-date VASSAL module
• Web-version at grognard.com
• Scan of original article

Changelog

• Version 2.0
  • Major updates to the module
    • Automatised combat declaration and odds and DRM calculations
    • Automatised combat resolution
    • Automatised staging of reinforcements
    • Better airfield hex status counters
    • “Ol’School” variant
    • Tutorial (Video)
• Version 1.0
  • First upload of this module

Copyright and License

This module is © of Christian Holm Christensen and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.