Paper Wars 83: Rising Sun Over China
Paper Wars 83 is worth knowing about for one reason: it covers the Second Sino-Japanese War, a conflict that killed millions and that almost no wargame publisher will touch. Compass Games put it out in August 2016 as a magazine with a complete game inside.
Buy it if the China theatre is the gap in your collection and you can still find a copy. That second condition is the real obstacle — the magazine-plus-game bundle has been out of stock at retailers for years, and the magazine-only edition at $22.95 gets you the articles without the game.
Why this conflict is the point
The Second Sino-Japanese War is one of the largest and least-gamed conflicts of the twentieth century. Japan’s full-scale invasion began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, though the aggression had been building since the Mukden Incident of 1931 and the occupation of Manchuria that followed. After December 1941 it folded into the wider Pacific War.
The casualty figures are difficult to state precisely and every source ranges: something between 15 and 22 million Chinese civilian deaths, roughly 3 to 4 million Chinese military casualties, and something over a million Japanese military casualties in the China theatre. Whatever the exact numbers, the scale dwarfs most campaigns that get boxed treatments every few years.
For a designer it is an awkward war to model. It combined conventional operations, guerrilla warfare, an uneasy and often hostile relationship between Nationalist and Communist Chinese forces, and logistics stretched across terrain running from coastal plains to mountainous interior provinces. None of those elements is optional if you want the war to feel like itself, and all of them resist clean rules.
That difficulty is exactly why so few publishers attempt it, and why a magazine wargame is a reasonable place for it to appear.
The magazine format, and what it buys you
Paper Wars is Compass Games’ wargaming magazine, following a distribution model that goes back to Strategy & Tactics in 1966: a magazine of articles, designer notes and historical essays, with a complete game bound in.
The economics are the whole argument. Production costs are far below a boxed retail game, which means a publisher can cover a topic that would never justify a full print run. Niche history gets made because the format is cheap enough to risk.
The trade-off is physical. Magazine games ship paper maps and die-cut cardboard counters rather than mounted boards and moulded pieces. A paper map wants a sheet of plexiglass over it if counters are going to stay where you put them, and counter trays stop setup from eating the evening.
Judge it on that basis and the format is good value. Judge it against a $70 GMT box and it will always look thin, which is the wrong comparison to make.
What to know before buying
Two practical points matter more than any rules detail.
Availability. Issue 83 is from 2016 and the bundle including the game is long out of stock. Check carefully what a listing actually contains before paying — the magazine-only edition exists and is a different product. A listing that says “Paper Wars 83” without specifying is worth a question to the seller.
Table commitment. Operational wargames on paper maps are not games you set up and pack away in an evening. If you cannot leave a table standing between sessions, a campaign-length scenario is not realistic, and that is a constraint on the format rather than on this title.
If you cannot find a physical copy, VASSAL is the usual answer for out-of-print wargames. Modules for magazine titles are commonly available free, and the wargaming community coordinates remote play through forums — a practical route both for scarce games and for a two-player title where finding a local opponent who shares the interest is its own problem.
What works and what does not
Works well:
- Covers a conflict of enormous scale that the hobby almost entirely ignores.
- The magazine format is what makes a topic this niche publishable at all.
- Designer notes and historical essays alongside the game, which boxed releases rarely match.
- Cheaper than any comparable boxed operational wargame.
Does not:
- Out of print since 2016, and the bundle is the hard version to find.
- Paper map and die-cut counters need accessories to be practical.
- A two-player operational wargame is a real scheduling commitment.
- The magazine-only edition is easy to buy by mistake.
Verdict
8/10. The score is for the choice of subject and the format that made it possible, not for components — a magazine wargame is never going to win on those and does not try to.
Buy it if the Second Sino-Japanese War interests you and you find a complete copy at a fair price. If you only want to read about the war, the magazine-only edition does that job for $22.95. If you want an operational wargame you can actually get hold of, look at what Compass and GMT have in print now, and treat this as the back-catalogue curiosity it has become.
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