by RockyMountainNavy, 18 April 2024 ~ #UnboxingDay
My local used bookstore seems to have come into possession of some grognards wargame collection from the 1970s and 1980s. One of the gems I found recently is The Fast Carriers: Air-Sea Operations, 1941-77 by Jim Dunnigan published by SPI in 1975.
My copy of The Fast Carriers comes in the typical (for its day) SPI flat tray. For those of you who never experienced the joy of a flat tray; well, behold the 12″ x 15″ x 1″ plastic storage solution. In retrospect, I am surprised a bit at just how much plastic was still in use even after the 1973 Oil Crisis. You definitely need to store these older games in cool, dark places because the plastic does not age well.
Opening The Fast Carriers, one finds the cover/back sleeve on one side and the game on the other. There was no chance of a mounted SPI map board back in those days because the package simply couldn’t take it. All the printed matter had to fold into a size less than the box.
It is a real shame that old SPI wargames like The Fast Carriers used a folded sleeve on the back the box to market themselves. Today this gets covered up and makes it harder to see the marketing material. Then again, with the BGG app on your phone (like a good grognard it is on your phone, right?) maybe this is less of an issue than it was back in the 1990’s when I was also buying used SPI titles.
Yes, my copy of The Fast Carriers suffers from the dreaded “box-back-detachment syndrome” where the black cardstock backing on the underside of the tray separates (I heard Ardwulf has a solution, right Ardie?). I’m kinda lucky my copy of The Fast Carriers still has the tray covers. Note also the middle compartment. That’s a single small d6 in there. I have another game with two die in there and I swear I will never be able to get them out!
The counters in The Fast Carriers are small, even for their day. That text is really, really small. Games like this that is why tweezers for wargamers became a thing.
Content wise, The Fast Carriers is pretty standard for a SPI wargame of its day. The map is rough 22″ x 34″ and in the usual muted color palate of those days. Note that the box sleeve said “six maps;” well, I guess there are technically six maps on that single sheet…
The rest of the game materials of The Fast Carriers is again bog-standard for SPI or most any wargame publisher of those days. The player aids are on a mix of cardstock and colored paper. The rule book is a relatively short 24 pages. I was also happy to see the previous owner(s) had copies of several relevant articles from wargame journals of the day.
I commented in my analysis of The Fast Carriers that, unlike another Dunnigan naval wargame published in 1975, there are no Zones of Control in this game. Looking at the rule book, I guess that the expectation was that every wargame have rules for zones of control. The fact that there is a rule that there is no rule is another interesting glimpse into the early days of naval wargaming.
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