by Ian T. Brown, 28 August 2025
Commercial wargames featuring a future conflict against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are nothing new. You can trace them back for many years, from FlashPoint: South China Sea (2022) to Breaking the Chains (2014) to Red Dragon/Green Crescent (2012) and its progenitor, Red Dragon Rising (2008) (I will confess that one my favorites is not tabletop but digital—Command and Conquer: Generals, released in 2003, is in my opinion a very underrated game in the C&C series and one of my favorite tactics was building legions of hackers to constantly replenish my coffers; plus the nuke cannon was a lot of fun. But I digress).
Games more closely focused on a potential PRC invasion of Taiwan aren’t new either—GMT’s NextWar: Taiwan has been around for more than a decade, and Armchair Dragoon readers are doubtless familiar with the Dietz Foundation’s Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific, first released in 2023 with a map of Taiwan one of the four included in the box. While not commercially available, the AD community has likely also heard of the Operational Wargame System (OWS) developed by the United States Marine Corps, the first module of which focused on Taiwan and the surrounding environs, and which later had a separate standalone Taiwan module developed.
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Even publishers based in the PRC have released a few Mandarin-language games on the subject. The Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) series from War Drum Games (based in Shanghai) covers much of the same geographic territory as OWS. War Drum Games also offers a tactical-level game system called Front from the Grind, the first module of which—named Fearless Saber—focuses quite specifically on the northern part of Taiwan.
Another PRC-based publisher—Kilovolt Design, based in Ningbo City—has released a modular game system titled (somewhat ominously) The Coming Wave, which includes a detailed breakout map for Taiwan.
Given it would be virtually impossible for anything published in the PRC about the operations of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to not have at least tacit approval from the Chinese Communist Party, the JADO series is probably as much about strategic messaging as it is a wargame.
One might think that everyone around Taiwan is pondering what a war on the island would look like except for the Taiwanese themselves. With the release of 2045, wargamers now have one answer, at least, to that question.
I first learned about the development of 2045 from a news article shared on Twitter last fall, and was immediately fascinated for a number of reasons. Wargames are a projection of the worldview of the designer(s)—2045 potentially offered unique insights into how those who would be the target of an invasion viewed that looming threat in their own words. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine having passed the two-year mark at that point; having done a number of interviews with both Ukrainians and Americans who had fought in Ukraine since 2022; and with wargame design for military professionals my actual, well, profession, I knew just how valuable such first-hand insights might be.
2045 also promised a more multi-faceted perspective on a PRC invasion, looking not only at the strictly military components but on the impacts and response of Taiwanese civil society as well. It advertised player roles across a wide spectrum, from the Taipei government and military who would naturally fight back, to arms manufacturers and criminal groups whose loyalty might be more…indifferent…to a hidden pro-unification faction whose well-timed betrayal would be the death knell for the island’s independence.
Professional interest won out—nobody would care more about an invasion of Taiwan than the Taiwanese, and I wanted to see it through their eyes.
I found other aspects of the game fascinating more out of my own morbid curiosity than professional interest. Early pictures of the game indicated a strong sci-fi flavor—which was fine, I’m a huge geek—but some of the game events looked like they might cross the line so deeply into the fantastical (such as the literal intervention of a local deity) that they might “break the spell” of a serious look at a future conflict. 2045 also seemed to incorporate a heavy dose of anime, which is a genre I have no particular interest in and I wasn’t sure if I could really get into a game that required a deep affinity for anime culture.
Professional interest won out—nobody would care more about an invasion of Taiwan than the Taiwanese, and I wanted to see it through their eyes. So I backed the crowdfunding campaign, and waited. I’ll confess I waited with a little trepidation; I had to Google Translate each webpage step of the order, and while I was pretty sure I’d ordered an English-language edition of the game, all the game updates were emailed in Mandarin and so I feared there was a non-zero chance that I’d receive a game whose rules and components I wouldn’t be able to read.
I shouldn’t have worried. When 2045 showed up at my door and I unboxed it, I found the game included two full sets of components and rules: one set in Mandarin, and one in English. And not just Google Translated English, but either professionally translated or written in English from the ground up. It was very, very clear that the designers of 2045 wanted English-speaking players—probably from a very specific English-speaking country that might have the resources to do something about a real-world PRC invasion—to understand all aspects of the game with crystal clarity. Strategic messaging works both ways, Chairman Xi.
Components
The game box and components therein are all of excellent quality and indicative of a design philosophy that wanted to place not simply good game mechanics in players’ hands, but a good game in every physical aspect.
Included in the box are, as I said, duplicate components depending on whether the players read Mandarin or English. The only components not duplicated are various wooden blocks, plastic stands for player characters, PLA and Taiwan Army tokens, and the mounted game board itself.
Speaking of the game board, this is where the first of many insights into the designers’ perspective on a potential invasion start to manifest. The island of Taiwan is divided into six different areas with key cities annotated, and those key cities are aligned with three different “factions” that players seek to gain influence from during the course of the game—Corporate, Pro-Government, and Local Support. It is interesting to see the designers’ own assessment of domestic power structures in their choices of which cities are aligned with which faction (though some cities can be aligned with multiple factions).
The game board also has three PLA invasion zones where the PRC can muster its forces. The invasion zones are not necessarily surprising to people who have either played other commercial wargames on a Taiwan invasion or who have looked at this problem from a more professional angle. Taiwan has some very challenging terrain packed into its geography which places hard limits on where things like landing craft and helicopters can insert troops. The Taiwanese certainly know their own island, and so the game board reflects those limited invasion zone options available to the PLA.
2045 is functionally a card-driven game, with cards divided into starting player characters, PLA Elite characters, Action cards (which correlate to different zones on the island), and Mission cards (which also correlate to different zones on the island). Of note, while both Action cards and Mission cards match specific locations on Taiwan, the island is divided differently depending on the card type; this makes for some fascinating tension in player choices since the missions which can gain players points toward victory conditions don’t always match where their powerful Action cards can be played.
Another thumbs up to the designers on the game components—included in the game box is a complete set of card sleeves sufficient to sleeve all cards of your chosen language with some extras left over, and the sleeved cards fit into the box trays just as well as unsleeved cards.
Winning the game derives from a combination of Contribution points and score points accrued in gameplay; completing Mission cards are how players earn score points depending on which side of the Mission card they choose.
As mentioned above, the Mission cards correlate with different zones on Taiwan, so players need to make choices about where and how to allocate their military forces to earn Mission score points. What is also interesting about the Mission cards is they have two options for scoring: a pro-Taiwan option and a pro-PRC option. This is another reflection of the designers’ perspective on the potentially nebulous loyalty of different player factions—depending on one’s faction, “allowing” the PLA to gain a battlefield victory may be worth it, either in the short-term or long-term (more on that later).
The Action cards drive player choices within the turn structure and fall into two categories: Characters or Events. The types of Characters and Events are where we see some of the more fantastical/anime flavors of the game come to the forefront, and are potentially where hardcore/grognard wargamers might start to turn up their noses and find the fantastical distracting from the “war” part of the game. However I accepted them as part of the game world the designers were trying to portray which was not just about the “war” part of the invasion, but about different dynamic cultural elements that can affect war. Sometimes that means political or social culture; sometimes that means pop culture; and sometimes that means culture that ventures deep into the murkier pasts of shared history and legend.
Was it an ancient deity descending from the heavens that caused the failure of an enemy attack which, on paper, should have succeeded? Probably not; on the other hand, military history is full of contingent events where what should have happened on paper failed in reality. Call it divine intervention, or call it Clausewitizian friction—the point is, war is full of random and frustrating events that defy all efforts by commanders to control or explain them, and if you accept that that’s what some of the more off-the-wall Action cards functionally represent in 2045, you’ll be just fine.
However it was in certain types of Action cards where I found some of the most revealing and fascinating designer assumptions that underlie their perspectives on how a future PRC might play out. Several Events—such as The Battle for Water, Choosing a Side, and Peace Settlement?—have two player choices, similar to the Mission cards, with either a more pro-Taiwan or pro-PRC option. Again, this reflects designer assumptions about nebulous loyalty of some aspect of the Taiwanese population. But it also reflects some of the potentially agonizing choices Taiwanese military and civilian leaders might have to consider when thinking about “what comes after,” regardless of whether the PRC’s invasion is repelled or not. Is blowing a dam on a water reservoir worth short-term military gain if it causes long-term civil suffering?
Other Action cards provide players with “fight to the finish” options that border on the apocalyptic. Defend to the Death gives a benefit to your forces in certain cities but also incentivizes defending those cities well past the point of rational military logic. Strategic Water Outage turns parts of the island into permanent deserts in order to impede mobility. And End of the World…well, it’s a suicide mission with nukes that can certainly cause severe casualties to the PLA but potentially sacrifices your own forces that you might want later in the game (we’ll revisit this card later). The quasi-apocalyptic nature of these cards comes from the designers’ understanding that Taiwan is not a large island, its forces are limited in number, and maneuver is already challenging on Taiwan’s terrain. But if the choice is a desert or submission to an invader…we’ve already seen in Ukraine the hard choices made by defenders who know submission carries the seeds of ultimate annihilation. The decision by the designers to include cards like this indicates a worldview that even the worst of hard choices is not as bad when submission and annihilation are the alternatives.
Finally, there are the Action cards that make assumptions about various avenues of foreign support/intervention in a future invasion. They cover the gamut from Japanese forces on the southern Sakishima islands adjacent to Taiwan, to volunteers from the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance, to the near-nation state capabilities from private companies like StarLink, to American military units posted nearby in Okinawa.
These cards hit me hard because of how starkly they illustrate the changes that can happen in the global order in a relatively short time. The designers of 2045 probably started prototyping and development in 2023, maybe even earlier. Back then, they could have watched Five Eye military support to Ukraine, Elon Musk’s StarLink satellite constellations providing Ukrainian forces with vital command and control pipelines, and international volunteers coming to halt the Russian invaders—and assumed they would receive the same level of allied and private support should the PRC attack them.
Fast forward to today, and the United States has torn up pre-existing agreements with its Five Eye partners, Musk has turned into…whatever he is now, and the PRC receives gentler rhetoric than long-time allies like Japan. If tomorrow the PLA showed up in the invasion zones off Taiwan, and Taipei called for help, what roster of nations and individuals would answer in 2025 as compared to two years ago?
I’m less certain of who would be on that roster, and the game designers—and Taiwanese as a whole—are likely less certain as well.
”A promise is a promise” indeed.
Gameplay
I’ll use my most recent playthrough with one of my gaming circles to describe gameplay. We had five players for this iteration, which is the maximum number recommended. The first step before getting into the turn sequence is having players select their game identity, each of which has its own “passport” describing unique faction abilities, as well as player aids summarizing turn sequence and victory scoring. Note that there are six player identities but a maximum of five player slots; the game designers may have done this so that, if a full set of five players don’t want to use the hidden traitor faction, they can play a straightforward game of resistance without worrying about potentially getting stabbed in the back.
Player identities are kept secret to preserve the hidden traitor and nebulous loyalty elements—the Unification Committee faction has the option of switching sides at any point during the invasion, and Silicon Shield Inc., Whale Aerospace, and the Tian Di Alliance all have scoring strategies where either tacitly or actively letting the PLA win can be to their advantage. Players can try to deduce the possible identities of their fellow players through observed behaviors, but identities remain hidden until the end of game, or until a player reveals their identity for a one-time special ability bonus.
Of note, the PLA isn’t a player faction; it’s a bot that the rest of the players interact with and whose behavior players can shape in order to create scoring advantages for themselves or disadvantages for their opponents. This will become clearer below in discussing the turn sequence.
After selecting an identity, each player randomly draws one of six starting characters and sets them up on the game map with the corresponding Taiwanese Army forces.
Players draw a Mission card from the zone associated with their character’s starting location and then take turns picking where in the player order they want to start the game. Player order changes at the end of each full turn sequence, and each slot in player order has its own advantage—gaining additional Action or Mission cards, gaining intelligence on hidden Action cards—so going first in player order isn’t always the best option.
The game begins with the first player in player order going through the turn sequence. 2045 has an open-ended turn structure and victory conditions: depending on the number of Action cards a player has they may be able to take several turns inside each full round, and the number of total rounds the game takes depends on PLA control of various key cities on Taiwan. A vigorous (or extremely poor) defense during the first three turns means the players can potentially end the game in three rounds; after that, it becomes a sliding scale of key city control between the Taiwanese Army and PLA that is checked at the end of each full round, and the game ends in five rounds no matter what.
This playthrough included five players, with the Silicon Shield Inc. faction being the only one not selected (I knew this as the GM but the other players did not; the key point was one player had selected the potentially traitorous Unification Committee, and so I was very curious when and if they would choose to change sides to join the PLA invaders). I added the initial PLA invasion units to the map per the set up instructions and we began.
On their turn, players initially choose whether to play a card to perform certain actions, or pass. Once a player passes they can’t perform any more actions, but they do get to choose which slot on the player turn order they’ll begin in the next round, so passing first or passing early potentially has advantages in the long run. The current player chooses an Action card from the face-down supply—or an Action card from their hand they accrued on a previous turn—and can either use the Action card to deploy a new Character or trigger an Event, or discard the Action card to perform a basic action like recruiting new forces, moving their deployed Characters around the map, or redeploying a previously discarded Character card. There is also a PLA Elite card on the board during each round which one player must select at some point (more on that below).
After using their Action card, the active player then enters the Incite the Enemy step of the turn. This is where players interact with the PLA bot. The active player first increases the PLA troop presence by adding new PLA reinforcements to locations currently held by the PLA—the PLA is always on the attack, always dumping new troops into the meat grinder. Then the active player decides whether to Lure the PLA or Incite Elite. Again, the PLA is always on the attack, but this is where player scoring strategies come into the mix.
If the player decides to Lure the PLA, they direct the movement of PLA forces from one location to another, with the final location not having any PLA presence. This could be an unoccupied city, or it could be a city occupied either by the active player’s forces, or another player’s forces. If the PLA forces end movement in a city with Taiwanese Army units, a battle ensues. Battles are very straightforward—the side with a higher army unit count wins, the loser retreats and takes losses equal to the difference, and control of the city potentially changes from Taiwan to PLA.
Would a player ever want to lure the PLA toward their own forces? Absolutely, because destroying PLA units is how players gain Contributions, one of the two scoring metrics in the game. Luring a small PLA force toward one’s own forces can mean an easy victory and quick Contribution points. The active player can combine this with a Mission card that might add scoring points toward their total for completing a mission that requires defeating a PLA force in a specific location.
But the active player may want to lure the PLA toward an opponent to deflect a strong PLA force away from themselves, or set their opponent up in a losing position that the active player could then take advantage of with a follow-on attack later in the round. It all depends on the active player’s faction and scoring strategy.
The other option, Incite Elite, activates one of the PLA Elite leaders deployed to the board, so let’s briefly talk about how those leaders come into the game. If, on a player’s turn, there are no Action cards left to pick on the board and they have none in their hand, they may be forced to select the PLA Elite card that’s on the table for this round and play it to deploy the PLA Elite leader. The PLA Elite card for the round always gets played, it’s just a matter of when, and players have to judge whether or not it’d be better to play the PLA Elite on their turn so that they still have the option of doing other actions later in the round.
The PLA Elite are bad news—they normally deploy to the map with a large number of PLA units and can cause a secondary negative effect in the zone to which they deploy. If a PLA Elite is on the map and the active player decides to Incite, the Elite moves and takes all but one of the PLA units from their location with them. This means that, should a battle result at the end of the movement, the Taiwan defender may face a very large stack of PLA forces, with the organic strength of the PLA Elite added to the overall total.
This sounds like a bad deal for whichever Taiwanese player is defending against the Elite; but again, this also creates a potentially lucrative scoring opportunity. A player might have a Mission card tied to defeating an Elite; and if not, defeating an Elite in battle gains the player additional Contribution points for the combat value of the Elite, in addition to any Contribution points gained by destroying the conventional PLA forces associated with that Elite. The active player may also have a defending Character with special attributes that get activated when in combat with an Elite, so what might initially appear to be a lopsided battle in favor of the PLA could actually be a walkover for the defender.
Once all players have passed, the Action cards and PLA Elite card for the next turn get restocked, the player order is adjusted, and the game moves to the next round. As mentioned above, the end-of-game condition isn’t checked until the end of round three.
In our game, the first two rounds went with players generally using their Action cards to deploy new Characters and lure PLA forces into battles where they could be destroyed and earn players Contribution points. A pattern began emerging through the first round, and solidified during the second round. We had three players on the south of Taiwan all fighting a pretty solid defense, luring in small numbers of PLA units to be destroyed. An unspoken agreement seemed to form among players to direct the PLA reinforcements to the center invasion zone, but not lure them any deeper. At some point in the future, that growing stack of PLA invaders might be a problem, but if the tacit agreement held, those PLA units wouldn’t be moving very aggressively.
Now it all made sense, and the traitor’s timing was excellent.
But having three players defending the south of the island left the north lightly held, which made the group curious when the fifth player decided to deploy a PLA Elite there and Incite it under conditions where the Elite would clearly advance to gain control of key cities. Early in the second round, that same player deployed a second PLA Elite to the north, which left the one player attempting to defend against them begging for assistance from the other players in the south. But before anyone could move to help, that pesky fifth player revealed themselves as the Unification Committee and actively declared their allegiance to the PRC. Now it all made sense, and the traitor’s timing was excellent.
Their timing was excellent because the PLA Elite had overwhelming superiority in the north, and now much of the stack of PLA reinforcements that had been growing in the middle invasion zone flipped to the traitor’s control. This created a second dagger pointing toward the center of the island and risked isolating the three players fighting in the south from ever going north to help the lone loyal player left holding the line up there.
The game moved to round three—the first round where victory conditions would be checked—and absent some very aggressive movements by the four loyal players (and some luck), it was very possible that the PLA and turn-cloak Unification Committee player could win at the end of the round. Players took their turns, and while the three players in the south started trying to break through the traitor forces to get north, there were enough traitor forces in the middle of the island that breaking through proved very difficult. The Unification Committee Incited the Elite to capture more key cities in the north, and it looked the game might well end in round three with a PRC victory.
And then the lone loyal player desperately holding the line in the north drew the End of the World Event card (unbeknownst to the rest of the players). Effectively using the card would require careful timing, along with the hope that the Unification Committee player wouldn’t aggressively counterattack. But if that lone player didn’t even try, the PLA/Unification Committee would win mathematically in a couple more player turns. So they tried.
On their next turn, the player in the north moved their lone stack of Taiwanese Army forces to attack and capture at least one city in area A of Taiwan. It succeeded; but if the Unification Committee counterattacked and drove them back, then End of the World couldn’t come into play and the game would essentially be over. But on the Unification Committee’s next turn, their concern seemed to be preventing the three players in the south from linking up with the north, and so their actions were directed toward the middle of the island to prevent that link-up. The turn order came back to the lone northern player, who then dropped End of the World.
At the sacrifice of their remaining forces, the player in the north successfully triggered a weapon of mass destruction attack that wiped all PLA units and PLA Elite off of northern Taiwan. The Unification Committee player was out of actions to respond before the round ended. We checked the scoring, and Taiwanese forces had retained control of enough key cities to end the game in round three with victory for Taiwan.
We did the scoring calculations to see which player had actually “won,” since everyone’s fighting the PLA (except the Unification Committee) but only one player is the ultimate victor. If there is one gripe I have about 2045, it’s in this part of the game: gameplay that is otherwise defined by simplicity and elegance of design becomes quite fiddly when it’s time to figure out who the winner is.
This is because the final score comes down to several variables: not just who destroyed the most PLA units or completed the most Mission cards, but there are modifiers based on how many of the key cities influenced by the three island factions—Corporate, Pro-Government, and Local Support—remain free of PLA control, what level of influence each player has gained from those three factions in defending or deploying new Characters to those key cities, the player who has the most Contribution points is the “Hero of Taiwan” which adds another modifier that then gets applied to all their other scoring points, etc. Oh, and if the game ends in a PRC victory, there’s a separate set of scoring equations. A fifth of the rulebook pages are devoted to explaining the scoring mechanisms. The game designers did create an app for making scoring calculations easier; unfortunately as of August 2025, the app remains unavailable in either Apple or Google Play app stores in the United States.
Once we’d gone through the scoring, the player who had sacrificed their forces in the north was, appropriately, deemed the winner. We did have a brief post-game discussion about the real-world implications of that decision though. Nuking the northern tip of Taiwan had annihilated the PLA forces there, letting the Taiwanese Army retain control of enough cities in the center and south of the island to win. However, those cities in the north were where the bulk of Taiwanese industry—and the Taiwanese population—were located. Perhaps that was “victory,” but life on Taiwan following such a victory would be hard. Very hard.
However I later found out that a Taiwanese gamer playing 2045 had done the same calculus of a hard future versus a future of surrender, and come to the same conclusion. An independent Taiwan facing a hard future could still deal with that future on its own terms; a conquered Taiwan could not control its future at all.
Conclusion
2045 is an excellent entry in the genre of games that depict an invasion of Taiwan. It is straightforward to play (except for end-of-game scoring), its components are of high quality and visually attractive, and its mixture of game mechanics—hidden traitor, card-driven actions, multiple paths to victory—means that each playthrough feels fresh and different from those that came before it. As I said above, the grognard wargamer might dismiss 2045 as “not a wargame” because of its more fantastical elements. However, if you can simply accept those elements as highly imaginative manifestations of Clausewitzian friction, then you can accept 2045 as a light wargame. Indeed I would argue that it’s a “wargame, plus”—with the “plus” being the social, economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural assumptions of the designers that underlie the game’s design and gameplay.
I might even go so far as to argue that, for those who play the genre of Taiwan invasion games from a more professional perspective, you have a professional obligation to put this game at the top of your pile. Why? Because to date, this is the only game designed by people for whom a PRC invasion is not an intellectual exercise. For them, a PRC invasion could mean the end of their world as they know it. 2045–with its English-language components—is a loud message directed toward ears which the designers hope are listening. It is a message asking for the help, the support, needed for their civilization to freely control the trajectory of its own existence. Perhaps a last comment on some game components I have not yet mentioned will drive that point home.
2045 comes with three additional components that have no effect on gameplay, but which encapsulate the strategic narrative perhaps better than the game itself. One of those components is a Mandarin-language civil defense guide. The second is map highlighting, from Taiwan’s perspective and self-knowledge, the most likely invasion beaches the PRC would use for an amphibious assault. The third is an empty passport-style book embossed with the words Let me fly as a Taiwanese.
The civil defense guide is not in English because no English-speaking nation needs to worry about an armed invasion by one of its neighbors. The map is not in English because no population of an English-speaking nation needs to know which areas they might need to evacuate should their armed neighbor send its military might against them. But for Taiwanese players, both documents may, some day in the future, be of vital importance to their survival.
Let me fly as a Taiwanese—that’s in English. It speaks of a future distinct from a Party or People’s Republic. It hopes those who speak that language are listening.
A promise is a promise.
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Ian, great review! I see it costs 70 Euros. https://mizoriot.com/products/2045
Thanks! And it’s definitely work picking up a copy if you can find it.