by Gideon Marcus
It's kind of a funny thing. There are two feelings about war these days. On the one hand, you've got the war in Vietnam raging without end despite LBJ resigning and Nixon running ostensibly to end the thing. Now National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger is pleading for patience from those who say peace is taking to long. "Come back in a year," he says. It's no surprise that, in addition to innumerable protests and chart-topping songs, we've even got a wargame devoted to dissent: Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.
But "war" also conjures up other, less controversial, memories. The veterans of World War 2 are my age—affluent and nostalgic. We recently celebrated the centennial of the Civil War, which while bloody, shaped these United States we know today. It's no surprise that the bulk of commercial wargames have been set in these two eras…with WW2 the big favorite: Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, D-Day, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, Battle of the Bulge, Afrika Korps, Midway.
Avalon Hill is currently the leading publisher of wargames, generally coming out with one or two new ones every year (along with a handful of "family" titles). Their latest, just released in April, is Anzio, and it's something of a revolution.
In 1943, flush with victory after kicking the Nazis and Fascists out of Africa, and having conquered the island of Sicily, it was pretty obvious where the Western Allies (mostly the United States and the Commonwealth) would attack next. After all, France was still well guarded as Festung Europa, so a cross-channel invasion was not yet in the cards. And so, Operation Avalanche was born: an amphibious invasion of the southwest Italian city of Salerno.
U.S. Army engineers haul a roll of wire mesh into position to make a beach roadway at Salerno, September 1943. USS LST-1 is in the center background (USA C-276).
In short order, southern Italy had been liberated, and the Germans had arrayed themselves along an unbreakable "Volturno Line". That's when the Allies tried to break the stalemate with a landing near Rome at Anzio beach. That beachhead stalled for months until May 1944, when, accompanied by a big aerial push, the Allies managed to take the Italian capital. That didn't end the war, though—the Germans just installed a puppet government in northern Italy and fought a delaying action until the Nazi surrender in May 1945.
As a result, the bloody Italian campaign is kind of an historical footnote. Did it shorten the war by tying up troops? Or was it just a meatgrinder for GI Joes and Tommies?
Anzio doesn't answer these questions, but it does an excellent job of recreating the experience!
On the surface, it's just another WW2 wargame. We've gotten strategic games covering the Eastern Front (Stalingrad) and the Western Front (D-Day) and the African Front (Afrika Korps), so it is only natural that the next one would cover the Italian Front. Anzio even follows the Stalingrad pattern—using a key battle as the label for a multi-year, theater-wide conflict. And if you just play the basic game rules, it's pretty much every other Avalon Hill wargame, with a hex grid for movement rather than the traditional squares, little chits representing military units, a combat results table, and dice for determining said results.
But it's in the advanced rules that the differences really come out.
The biggest is the new way in which combat is resolved. In previous games, when units moved up next to each other, they had to fight. You totaled up the combat strengths of the opposing sides, figured out the odds ratio, rolled a die, and determined the result using the Combat Results Table. The result would be a retreat (one side or the other had to back away a certain number of spaces), or elimination of one or more units, or an exchange: smaller side destroyed, and an equal number of strength points removed from the larger side.
But now*, instead of a binary Alive/Dead situation, each unit has several diminished states. Each adverse combat results in a "step-loss", where a unit loses some, but not all, of its strength. This is much more realistic. Reinforcement is done realistically, too, represented by actual raw troop units with no attack strength of their own, but which can be added to depleted units to restore strength.
*It has been pointed out that the step-loss system was actually introduced in Blitzkrieg, which I had forgotten, and also appears in last year's 1914, which I never played. But, in any wise, Anzio is the first game to really implement it in a meaningful way, I think.
This means that you get realistic situations—attackers rail against a line, slowly diminishing the defenders' strength, until they become too weak to hold, and then they must fall back to regroup.
Where Anzio isn't innovating, it's adopting the best features of its predecessors: from D-Day—the Allies get to choose from a number of invasion beaches, which keeps the Germans guessing; from Blitzkrieg (and Afrika Korps)—units can be moved en masse by sea from place to place; and of course, similar movement and combat rules to most of its ancestors so that picking up the basics of the game is a snap.
Indeed, I was surprised at just how easy it was to pick up this game, despite it having the longest rules set to date—even longer than Blitzkrieg's, I think. There are some confusing bits, like it took us a while to realize that combatants suffer double losses when attacking defenders on favorable terrain, which makes attacks even more difficult. But on the whole, despite the dizzying array of rules, it's not bad at all.
To be fair, we didn't play with the really gritty rules like Italian troops (who fight for both sides, natch) and really finicky stacking rules (every member of the Commonwealth seems to have a different size!) but they don't seem to change gameplay much.
Which leads us to the eternal question (paraphrasing the fellow from the Folger's Crystals commercial) "How does it play?!"
"Well, play it!"
Pretty well! The Young Traveler and Trini played the Axis, conferring each turn on the best defensive strategy. Trini noted that, of all the games she's played to date, this one felt the most immersive—that she was really a general taking all sorts of considerations into account.
Janice and I teamed up as the Allies, and it was rough. There really is no quick way to do anything, and we had quite a lot of bad rolls at the beginning. We weren't even able to take Naples in the many hours we played, which is the linchpin to success in southern Italy as it frees up forces to make another amphibious invasion.
Ultimately, it's a slow slog of a game. The Allies must be patient, but also master the art of threatening multiple invasions at any given time. As for the Axis, there are no daring Rommel or Manstein thrusts to undertake. It's all about skillful retreats; if you're attacking, you're probably making a mistake…or the Allies have pulled quite the boner.
But it's definitely a beautiful game with a lot of fascinating new developments. Certainly, there's nothing like it on the market, in style or subject. If you've played out D-Day, and you've got a long weekend…or a string of short ones, this is a great game to take out for a spin.
