Red Dragon Rising: The Coming War With China

About this board game

Red Dragon Rising: The Coming War With China is a strategic-level investigation for 1–2 players, portraying roughly the first 30 days of a hypothetical war between China and a US-led counter-alliance. With an approximate playing time of 180 minutes, it examines a near-future conflict set between the present and the end of 2014.

One player takes the role of Peking’s top national leadership, while the opposing player represents the senior US military commander in the Western Pacific theater. The game is also easily adaptable for solitaire play, allowing one player to explore the conflict from either side.

The scenario begins with three central assumptions: China is the aggressor and revisionist power, the war starts over Taiwan, and the opening attack is conventional rather than nuclear. Nuclear escalation remains a looming danger as the conflict develops.

Rather than presenting events as a strictly ordered sequence, the system treats the war as a unitary vision. Time and space can telescope or expand, with action sometimes surging forward and sometimes slowing dramatically. The full course of the war is understood most clearly after play, when its events can be reconstructed into a linear account.

• Ground units generally represent brigades, including US brigade combat teams.
• Aircraft counters mostly depict mixed-type combat wings, while long-range bombers operate as separate mono-type units.
• Naval units primarily represent mission-oriented groupings, including Surface Action Groups and submarine groups.
• On the area map, one inch represents approximately 100 miles.

With its Taiwan-centered premise, unusual treatment of time, and strategic focus, Red Dragon Rising offers a distinctive framework for examining a rapidly unfolding Western Pacific crisis.