Jaws of the Dragon was a megagame held in London by an academic colleague looking at a potential Chinese of Taiwan. The game postulated that the initial landings had gone well, but now a week or so later the Chinese are starting to get bogged down and the US and other nations are mobilising to come to Taiwan's aid.
Being a megagame the main part was the hall of teams playing each nation and having political discussions and issuing orders to their armed forces. I was in the LOCON team, playing the Chinese Army on Taiwan, and other tables were managing the air and sea battles. A high level set of hex-and-counter type rules were meant to control the combat but in the end we freestyled quite a bit, guided by the rules.
In terms of how the game went, we almost managed to break-through the main Taiwanese defence but the US Marines arrived just in time in order to hold the line. Our biggest issue though was that the US subs had effectively blockaded Taiwan from China, so there was no way we were going to get resupplied or reinforcements. Apparently there was not a surface ship form either side left on the high seas. The US did a strategic air strike against Chinese industrial centres - particularly chip fabs, and the Chinese responded with small nukes against a US base in Japan. The US thought about it, sacked their President, and decided not to respond (or the other way around!). The real winner was probably the Philippines which had now become the dominant Naval power in the region and was wielding a high degree of influence!
My first experience of this type of game and great fun!
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| The Hall of Nations! |
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| Chinese High Command |
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| The Sea/Subsea table |
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| Our Land table |
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| The Air Table |
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| Close-up of the fighting |
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| The sentiment meter was a key part of the game |
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