What The General argued from 1964 to 1979, what Joe said in 2010, and the verdict the table still owes

2026-06-25

Midway (1964): Thirty-Five Articles, Fifteen Years, and No Agreement on Who Wins

In 1964, Avalon Hill put out a naval game in which the two fleets never see each other. Counters hunt across a gridded “Search Board,” calling out areas, guessing, bluffing about whether the planes are on the deck or in the air. It was one of the company’s first attempts at the Pacific, and one of the first wargames anywhere built entirely around hidden information. Players took to it immediately and then spent the next fifteen years arguing, in the pages of Avalon Hill’s own house magazine, about whether the thing was even balanced.

That argument might be the reason to put Midway back on the table. Over Volumes 1 through 16 of The General, the game generated something on the order of thirty-five feature articles and the very first wave contradicted itself in a single issue: Volume 1, Number 6 carried both “The Japanese Have The Best Of It In MIDWAY” and “Amercs Have It Made In MIDWAY,” back to back. Fifteen years later the magazine was still running pieces titled “MIDWAY-Equilibrated,” “Five Fickle Factors,” and “Mass Or Maneuver.” A retrospective critic, decades on, calls it his personal favorite. And the rest of the hobby press; Moves, Fire & Movement, Strategy & Tactics [yes, yes I know its an SPI house mag] — never reviewed the board game at all.

Three kinds of witness, and they do not line up. That is where these articles start.

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From the shelf — up front. This one comes to the table without a table. I have not played Avalon Hill’s Midway myself, so the usual tie-breaker — play it, don’t parrot it — is missing, and I’m not going to say otherwise. Why haven’t I? My copy was missing pieces and I do not do arts and crafts. – Plus solo would suck. What follows is the documentary case: the fifteen-year argument The General never closed, the retrospective verdict, and the history the game was built to model. The verdict the dice would settle is left open on purpose.

What it is

Midway is a two-player simulation of the carrier battle of 3–6 June 1942, on a scale of individual ships and aircraft squadrons. Joe, at Map and Counters, lays out the engine cleanly in his 2010 review:

“Play in MIDWAY begins at 0500 on 3 June… The American Fleet advances onto the game board from the east. On the first game turn ONLY, the American player may move up to six sea zones on the ‘Search Board;’ this movement bonus makes a first day carrier action possible.” — Joe, mapandcounters

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The turn is a search ritual. Both sides move, secretly ready (or don’t) their aircraft, and then call out search areas, the Americans probing four areas a turn, the Japanese three trying to locate a fleet that is hidden until found. Only when a strike actually launches do the ships come up onto a separate “Battle Board,” and dive bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters resolve against anti-aircraft screens and each other. As Joe notes, surface gunnery duels are “exceedingly rare,” and the whole apparatus is built to reproduce one sensation: where is the enemy fleet, and has he readied his planes or is he bluffing?

One rule matters more than any other for the history, and we will come back to it shortly: a carrier caught with readied planes on its deck can be sunk with one less hit than normal. Hold that thought, ahh tension and drama!

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The witnesses

The house, gets after it for 15 years! It never shut up (1964–79). Avalon Hill games were argued out in The General, and Midway got argued out longer and harder than almost anything. Joe’s companion piece, “Tricks Of The Trade: The General Looks At Midway,” catalogs the run : “An Exhaustive List of the Good, Bad, and Indifferent ‘MIDWAY’ Articles that Appeared from 1964–79.” It is a remarkable document: roughly thirty-five titles, from “MIDWAY-Reworked” (Vol. 1, No. 3) to “Advanced MIDWAY” (Vol. 16, No. 3), spanning solitaire systems, play-by-mail ladders, three separate “Series Replays,” and a parade of named experts — Harold Totten, William Searight, Lou Zocchi, and a young Don Greenwood, who Joe remembers as “a fearsome and diabolical MIDWAY player” before he “decided to specialize in losing at BREAKOUT: NORMANDY.”

Joe’s own read of that fifteen-year paper trail is itself a finding:

“the usefulness of the different articles… tended to vary inversely with their publication dates. The early pieces were usually of little real value, and occasionally even counterproductive. The later articles… were, with a few notable exceptions, much more instructive.” — Joe, mapandcounters

That sentence describes a game the community had to learn how to play correctly over a decade and a half. OR perhaps they had to discern the ‘nuance’, and subtleties therein? Build better strategies? The 1964 rules shipped; the understanding came later, in installments.

And the readers wrote in. The argument wasn’t confined to the feature articles; it ran through the letters column for years. Readers wrote in to demand Midway-style follow-ups — “as a follow up to Midway you might develop another ‘super’ game… [on] the battle of Leyte Gulf” (The General 5.6) and, the real tell of a game that gripped people, to work out how to “duplicate [Wade McClusky’s] real-life feat in the game of Midway,” noting that “McClusky’s eye-witness account appears in the Battle Manual that is published with the board game” (6.2). That detail matters twice: the game shipped with a participant’s first-hand account of the dive-bomber strike, and The General’s own reading column steered players straight to the source: “Midway by Fuchida and Okumiya an excellent study of the battle” (1.5). That is the same Fuchida account, recommended by name in Avalon Hill’s pages, whose “Five Fateful Minutes” the game’s rules had already turned into a die-roll modifier.

The reviews everywhere else.. there weren’t any. Here is the structural oddity. Search the — Moves, Fire & Movement, Strategy & Tactics — for a review of Avalon Hill’s Midway, and you find nothing about the board game. Fire & Movement #24 and Moves #56 both run a “Midway” review, but of a different object entirely: “Midway Campaign,” Avalon Hill’s 1980 microcomputer game (“one of Avalon Hill’s four initial entries in the computer wargame market,” F&M #24). Strategy & Tactics mentions Midway only as the 1942 battle, in passing, in its Leyte Gulf issue (#45). The 1964 board game’s critical life ran entirely inside one magazine the publisher’s own. The review conversation about Midway was a closed Avalon Hill conversation.

But the playing of it never closed. Twenty years after release, in the mid-1980s, the independent magazine Battleplan ran a reader-contributed variant — George Sauer’s “Midway Random Events” (#6) turning each 0500 turn into a chit-draw of weather, reinforcements, and damage events, with the standing invitation that “gamers should feel free to modify, change or omit events with which they disagree.” A game nobody outside Avalon Hill bothered to review was still, two decades on, a game players bothered to tinker with in print. That gap no reviews, enduring variants is itself the measure of the thing: Midway was a player’s game, not a critic’s. To me the best kind of game.

The retrospective critic (Joe, 2010). Joe plays it cold, decades later, and files the warmest verdict in the file. After a tour of the carrier games that followed  SPI’s Fast Carriers and USN, Battleline’s Flat Top, GDW’s Battle for Midway he plants his flag:

“MIDWAY, despite its dated rules, old-fashioned ‘squares instead of hexagons’ Search Board, and generally ‘hokey’ graphics, is still my personal favorite.” — Joe, mapandcounters

His reasons are threefold; playability (“Two experienced players can actually knock off a couple of games of MIDWAY in a single afternoon”), the fog-of-war intelligence duel (“where the heck is the American fleet, anyway? And should I send up my CAP this turn, or did my opponent ready his planes… as part of an elaborate bluff?”), and the historical feel “the stunning lethality of air strikes delivered against an unsuspecting enemy fleet.” He is candid about what it isn’t: “That may not be everything when it comes to simulating the actual Battle of Midway, but it is more than enough for me.”

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The fifteen-year balance war

Strip away the agreement that the hidden-search engine is good, that the game is fast and worth playing and the long conflict in The General is about one thing the magazine never settled: who has the edge in game play?

The contradiction was there at the start. The General Vol. 1, No. 6 (1964) printed two articles on the same question, in the same issue, reaching opposite conclusions. John E. Curtis, in “The Japs Have the Best of It in Midway,” made the American’s path to victory sound like a tightrope:

“The American fleet must get off the first assault, must do so without having been previously discovered when he was within range of the Jap fleet, must do so just before nightfall, and must sustain a minimum of losses to himself while inflicting at least a six-point loss upon his opponent.” — Curtis, The General 1.6

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A list of “musts” that long is an argument that the Japanese hold the edge. Ten pages later, Lou Zocchi planted the opposite flag with a wisecrack  “The only time I open my mouth is when I’m changing feet”  and a flat guarantee:

“the Japanese can’t possibly sink any American CV’s if my defensive system is employed and the Jap[s] use 2 CV’s for the attack… The Jap is weakest at the beginning of the game. If you can attack him before 1500 Hrs. on June 3rd…” — Zocchi, “Amercs Have It Made in Midway,” The General 1.6

Same game, same issue, same year — one author says the American victory conditions are nearly unachievable, the other says the American who plays his defense right cannot lose a carrier.

And it did not resolve from there. Vol. 2, No. 4 gave a “Definite Edge To The Japanese” (Gervol); Vol. 2, No. 2 found “MIDWAY’s Hidden American Power” (Zocchi again). By Vol. 4, No. 5 someone was trying to legislate a truce with “MIDWAY-Equilibrated” (Nelson); by Vol. 5, No. 6 it was down to “Five Fickle Factors” (Hallet); by Vol. 9 the debate had gone abstract — “Mass Or Maneuver” (Gray) and acquired a capstone, “The MIDWAY Thesis” by Totten and Greenwood (Vol. 9, No. 4).

A game whose own community needs fifteen years and thirty-five articles to decide whether it favors one side is telling you something. Either the balance genuinely sits on a knife edge that only expert play resolves the generous reading, and the one Joe’s “got better as I studied” arc supports or the search-and-bluff engine is so dominated by player skill that “balance” was never a property of the box at all, only of the matchup. The magazine argued as if the first were true. The structure of the argument suggests the second: when a game is decided by who reads the fog better, the published “edge” shifts every time a stronger player writes the next article.

That, in the end, is roughly where the experts landed. When Harold Totten and Don Greenwood, the two most respected Midway hands in the magazine , distilled “well over a year” of work into “The MIDWAY Thesis” (9.4), they did not crown a favored side. They changed the subject:

“MIDWAY constitutes a very different playing environment … it is a game that demands instinctive handling of unknowns and perfection in air-sea operations. You’ve got to outguess your opponent at every turn. A good MIDWAY player is recognized by his ability to react to any given situation.” Totten & Greenwood, “The MIDWAY Thesis,” The General 9.4

That is not a verdict on balance; it is a quiet admission that there was never a balance verdict to be had only a player led duel of judgment in which the better fog-reader wins. Fifteen years of “Japan has the edge / no, America does” resolves into “whoever outguesses the other.”

The rules the players had to fix

The other thing the long record exposes is that the published 1964 game was gameable in ways that needed patching  not by the designers, but by the community, over years. Joe again:

“popular demand has led to a few additional rules becoming standard for MIDWAY. These post-publication rules-changes have been added to prevent the use of unrealistic or questionable game tactics, such as: one-way ‘suicide’ air strikes (by either side); or… the ‘Brave Sir Robin’ practice of the American player exiting his ships off the east edge of the search board once he’d managed to pick up a tiny lead in victory points.” — Joe, mapandcounters

Both exploits are pure system-gaming a one-way strike spends planes the rules let you spend too cheaply; the map edge-run banks a VP lead the rules let you protect too easily. That they became standard house fixes gives Midway an air of a framework the hobby debugged collaboratively in the magazine for a decade and a half, because it was loved, and still enjoyed. The other way to view this is those gambits are taking advantage of what was back in the day a gentleman’s agreement to play the ‘spirit of the rules’, not be a loser and taking a massively ahistorical approach.

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What the game captures — and what 1964 “knew”

For all the arguing, Midway fixes on the two things the history says actually decided the battle — and it does so because it faithfully models the account that held the field in 1964.

The real Midway turned on intelligence and surprise. Nimitz, knowing from signals intelligence roughly where and when the Japanese would come, told Fletcher and Spruance that it was “absolutely vital for the US carriers to achieve surprise by hitting them first and from the flank” (Osprey Campaign 30: Midway 1942, p.29). The Japanese aim was the mirror image — Yamamoto’s plan was to draw “the enemy’s carrier fleet” into a “decisive battle” and destroy it (Osprey, p.14) — and it failed so completely that the only territory the operation gained was “the two remote Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska” (Osprey, p.12). Midway the game builds its entire turn around that intelligence duel, and hands the Americans their historical foreknowledge as a mechanic: the first-turn six-zone movement bonus is codebreaking, abstracted to a move.

And that one rule readied planes on deck die easier is the “Five Fateful Minutes.” The dramatic image of the American dive bombers arriving exactly as Nagumo’s carriers sat crowded with fueled, armed, rearming aircraft comes straight from Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya’s Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan (1955), whose chapter on the Nagumo force is literally titled “Five Fateful Minutes.” In 1964 that was the account of Midway — the insider Japanese narrative, vivid and decisive. Pinskey and Schutz built it into the rules. So the game is, in a real sense, a faithful simulation of the circumstances of the battle but not of the battle itself as the latest scholarship reconstructs it, but of the battle as it was understood the year the game was made.

(That account has not gone unchallenged since — the “planes packed on deck” tableau is exactly the part later historians have most picked at. But the game cannot be faulted for encoding the canon of its own moment; if anything, that is what makes it an artifact worth reading rather than just playing.)

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What the record can and can’t conclude

On the design. Midway (1964) is one of the hobby’s first true hidden-information games, and its search-and-bluff engine is good enough that a retrospective critic who has “probably played most” of its successors still ranks it first. Its virtues and its open questions are one fact, not a flaw: a game shallow enough to be “solved” would have been settled and shelved by 1966 t the fog stayed unsolved across fifteen years is the measure of its depth, not its deficiency. And the 1964-era history that gives it its feel makes it a faithful reconstruction of its moment, which is exactly what makes it worth reading half a century on.

On the reviews. There is essentially only one reviewer;  The General and it is not a reviewer so much as a fifteen-year argument with itself. That is its value: not a verdict, but a uniquely complete record of a community studying, mastering, and refining a single game in public, year after year, because it was worth the trouble. The independent press’s silence is the other half of the finding: in the 1970s, an Avalon Hill classic and the SPI hobby’s magazines lived in separate worlds, and Midway’s reputation was built and contested entirely inside the publisher’s own pages.

On the history. The game fixed on the two facts the historians agree mattered most  intelligence/surprise and the catastrophic vulnerability of carriers caught readying aircraft and instilled rules for them so directly that the codebreaking is a move bonus and the “Five Fateful Minutes” is a hit modifier. It did so by faithfully modeling the canonical 1964 account. When we discuss simplicity versus complexity in the BigBoardGaming Facebook forum, it is exactly this type of rule design that brings to the fore the critical aspects of the history, distilled into two excellent rules.

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The verdict my table still owes

The documentary record takes Midway to a clean edge and stops. Every witness agrees the hidden-search engine is the heart of the game; The General spent fifteen years unable to agree on anything else and the one modern critic on file loves it without quite being able to say it’s right. The single question every one of them circles : is it balanced, or is it just a skill duel wearing a battle’s clothes? Is exactly the question no amount of reading can close. It needs two players and a search board.

My session is yet to be played. So no comment yet! So this piece ends where the paper ends, Midway is a landmark fog-of-war design whose reputation was forged and fought entirely inside Avalon Hill’s own magazine, which faithfully simulates the 1964 understanding of the battle, and whose balance the hobby argued about for fifteen years without resolution. Whether the table would call it a knife-edge classic or a skill-decided period piece is the one finding still outstanding.

One thing we can conclude without a die: nobody writes thirty-five articles and fifteen years of letters about a game they don’t love. Try finding a title on BoardGameGeek today with fifteen unbroken years of back-and-forth in its forums you wil struggle. That correspondence is the real deal here, more than the game itself: it is what engagement looked like when it cost a stamp, a typewriter, and a wait. The friction of time. when having an opinion meant caring enough to mail it. That is the culture these pieces are written to remember, and, if I’m lucky, to provoke back into being.

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Sources

Magazine/board passages quoted are from in-session full-text extraction.