Adding Tac Bombers to Guadalcanal

Re: Adding Tac Bombers from AAP40!

Even though I bought the game back around 2010 I just recently started to give it a try. Anniversary and Global consumed all the time and focus. Last weekend I had my first game of Guadalcanal with Tac Bombers as an additional unit in the set-up. It works great!
Here are the stats we played with:
Cost: 4 reinforcement points
Range: 2
Air: 1
Sea: 2
Land: 1
Special ability: Target select for sea and land combat.

The first dice (or die) in the neck of the battle box (depending on the sort of combat and the number of Tac Bombers available) are those of the Tac Bombers. Hits are assigned by the attacker – the casualty strip is ignored for these hits only.

On the receiving end, the casualty strip positions 3, 4, 9 and 10 are assigned to tactical bombers instead of fighters.

At the beginning of the game, we started with one tactical bomber instead of one fighter on both of the two Japanese carriers in the seazone surrounding Rabaul and on the two US carriers in seazone K and the seazone surrounding New Caledonia.

Guadalcanal is an incredibly well balanced game. With tactical bombers the chance of sinking capital ships and thus scoring additional victory points rises. I would suggest to raise the victory score to 20 instead of 15.

Once we have more games under the belt, we will try the optional rules, including hidden movement. When doing so, we will most likely add another unit to the game: Seaplanes. They scout the endless ocean for the enemy and will give attacking aircraft an extra attack on naval forces in order to reflect the advantage of knowing where the enemy is. I still have to figure out exactly, how to do it. And I need some sculpts from HBG to get the job done.

@general-6-stars

This is how I envisage to introduce seaplanes into the game, when using the optional rule of Hidden Movement.
Cost: 3; Range: 5; Air: 0, Sea: 0, Land: 0
Set-up: 4 seaplanes are placed on both Rabaul and New Caledonia

Seaplanes are used for reconnaissance of enemy naval forces. They take off and land exclusively from Rabaul (Japan) and New Caledonia (USA) respectively. Thanks to their range, they can reach any sea zone on the map, but not the sea zones around Rabaul and New Caledonia. Turn Order:

1. Starting with the first player, transports and destroyers are loaded and the movements of naval units are secretly noted as mentioned in the rulebook.
2. Then seaplanes are sent out, once again starting with the first player. A player can scout a maximum of five sea zones per turn and send a maximum of two seaplanes per sea zone.
3. The secretly planned sea movements are executed.
4. A die roll is made for each seaplane that is in a sea zone containing at least one enemy ship. For a roll of 1 through 4, the attacker receives the appropriate number of bonus dice, but not more than one bonus die per fighter, tactical bomber and bomber he orders into that sea zone for combat. On a roll of 5 the seaplane does not sight the enemy, on a roll of 6 it is lost (due to bad weather, enemy fighters or engine failure).
5. Special Case: If a seaplane rolls a 1, instead of rolling one bonus die for an attacking aircraft, it may force an enemy submarine that is in the sea zone to submerge. A submerged submarine may not attack in this round. The other subs would get their shots on enemy vessels immediately after the dice rolls for seaplanes.
6. For the bonus dice gained by seaplanes, the attacker may roll once for 1 to 4 aircraft before starting air combat. Hits are assigned to enemy sea units according to the Casualty Strip, damaging or destroying them without returning fire. After casualties have been removed, the regular combat sequence takes place: air combat, sea combat and land combat.

Unlike Tactical Bombers, this rule needs to be play tested. But I think it will add a nice twist to the game without unbalancing it.