PACIFIC is a non-scale war game for 2 players. It is played on a board with pieces which represent naval Attack Planes, Aircraft Carriers, and Kamikazes. 

"One is prepared for surprises in [Finlay's] work, but not, perhaps, for the advent of PACIFIC... Finlay has previously designed a slate and marble chess set with austerely shaped pieces resembling submarine conning towers, but that was a contemporary invigoration of a traditional game... that was to erect irony upon artifice, that was the traditional mode - with certain differences! - of the poet. It was quite another thing to invite someone to win or lose a game with another player... what had this raiding game to do with the raid on the inarticulate (Eliot?) Poetry may be a superior kind of play, but can play be a superior kind of poetry?" [Orvell "Poe and the Poetics of Pacific" in Ian Hamilton Finlay Collaborations. p.17]

Recognized as one of the 20th century’s most important artists, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925- 2006) was a Scottish short-story writer, poet, concrete poet, visual and conceptual artist, sculptor, gardener and classical moralist. His work is distinguished for its semantic brevity, formal inventiveness, wit, beauty, and unwavering engagement with the relationship between civilization and violence. Replete with a number of recurring themes, his work shows a penchant for classical writers, a concern with fishing and the sea, an interest in the French Revolution, a continual revisiting of World War II and the memento mori Latin phrase, “Et in Arcadia ego.”  In 1961, Finlay set up the Wild Hawthorn Press with his partner Jessie McGuffie, both to publish his work as well as to publish the work of undervalued and international poets.