Enemy of My Enemy: Japanese Occupation

In the first article on the Enemy of My Enemy expansion, I covered the new Arab Revolt game that uses the Palestine map. In this article, I’ll pivot to the other new game included in the expansion, The British Way: Japanese Occupation. In a first for The British Way, the British faction, Force 136, acts as the insurgent player and their Japanese opponents the counterinsurgent. After the fall of Malaya and Singapore in early 1942, the entire Malayan peninsula was under Japanese occupation with only a fledgling resistance led by stay-behind British officers, such as Spencer Chapman of the famous book The Jungle is Neutral, and members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The British officers and MCP worked together to organize armed resistance against Japan. As the name of the expansion itself already suggests, the two opposing factions from The British Way: Malaya are now roughly on the same side in the prequel game. However, as I’ll expand upon below, to capture the uneasy alliance between the British and MCP and the lack of complete British control over the MCP’s units, the MCP operates in the game as a simplified non-player actor who may even win the game!