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[July 4, 1969] When Joey goes over the top… (Avalon Hill's Anzio)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
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.




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[May 24, 1967] Heavyweight Champion (Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg)

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by Gideon Marcus

With Muhammad Ali stripped of his title as heavyweight champion, owing to his refusal to enlist in America's armed forces to fight for nameless hills in Vietnam, the boxing world remains, for the moment, without a titular head.

Not so for the wargaming world.  A year and a half ago, Avalon Hill released its biggest, most complex title to date, and it still remains the monster amongst its hex-and-counter brethren.  Blitzkrieg is a truly impressive beast: three mapboards instead of the usual two, 100+ pieces per side (compare to chess' 16 or Afrika Korp's ~50), 16 pages of rules.

Yes, it's sure a big'n–but is it fun?  Read on!

Red vs. Blue–2

Nine years ago, Charles Roberts kicked off the board wargaming hobby in a big way with his Tactics 2 (there had been a Tactics (1) released a few years before, but its impact was slight).  Tactics 2, like chess, featured two more-or-less identical opponents with no geographical ties to any real world nations.  They fought with abstractions of regular forces, all army units.  So primitive was this game that it used squares instead of the now-standard hexes (still, paradoxically called "squares") that were a revolution in simulating movement.

Tactics 2 was not a fun game. It was a boring, endless slog.

Blitzkrieg is Tactics 2 done right.

You've still got the two generic countries, in this case "Great Blue vs. Big Red", but now the map is a lot more interesting.  In between the two titans are seven "minor countries" that can be occupied for more production potential.  There are beaches to land on, deserts to cross, mountain ranges to hole up in, oceans to sail.

And the other armed services aren't just abstractions anymore.  The Navy still is, with transport represented simply by the number of troops which can be at sea at any time (and fleets can't shoot each other as they pass by), but now there are Marines (well, Rangers) that can land anywhere as opposed to their GI cousins who must make assaults on beaches only.  And there is a profusion of Air Force units: three types of bombers, from the short-ranged assault type to the long-ranged strategic variety, not to mention escorting fighters.  There are also airborne units that can fly from airfields and land great distances away–critical to taking farflung strongpoints behind the lines.

Even the Army is heterogenous, with units representing infantry, armor, and artillery (though functionally, they all work the same–the only difference is their movement and combat factors).

Cities are essential to the game: a player can only support 12 combat factors of units for every city controlled.  A player who loses cities may find his or her units evaporating without a shot being fired.

The game is won one of two ways: either one side completely destroys all of the other side's units, or (more achievable), one side occupies all of the other side's cities for a turn.  A third option says the game can end by negotiated surrender, just like real life.  In practice, this is the most common outcome.  There comes a point when the end is inevitable, even if it be far off.

Easy to learn, hard to master

Taken individually, none of the rules in Blitzkrieg is particularly challenging.  At the base of it all is the standard move, fight sequence of all other Avalon Hill games.  The Combat Results Table (CRT) is novel–instead of the standard "Defender/Attacker Eliminated", "Defender/Attacker Retreats", "Exchange" results, both sides have the chance to lose strength points.  This means that after every fight, a player is usually "making change", exchanging full strength units for depleted ones.  This is more realistic as individual battles rarely destroy entire units.

There are stacking limits (no more than 15 combat strength to a square), terrain modifications (units doubled on defense in towns and mountains), zones of control (units going next to others must stop and fight), replacement units and reinforcement units–all standard stuff.

The new rules aren't too onerous.  Invasions work kind of like in D-Day where assaulting units line up on the beach and fight their way ashore.  If there's no one defending the beach, they get to zoom inland. 

In addition to the aforementioned parachuters, a player can also move 12 units of Army from one city to another–including ones just taken from the enemy that turn.  This can be huge.

The Air Force adds a completely new dimension…literally!  Tactical bombers add their strength to an attack while strategic bombers bomb completely separately, interdict supply, or reduce towns to rubble.  Medium bombers can do either!  Fighters engage bombers or each other.

There are even weather, nuke, and sea-based aircraft rules!

Again, none of these are particularly difficult to apprehend.  But in order to win the game, all must be employed, and skillfully.  Neglect the air capabilities of an opponent in favor of the human wave tactics that won you Stalingrad or Waterloo, and you'll soon find troops behind your lines eating your supply.  Neglect the threat of naval invasion, either to your shores, or as a thrust to throw the enemy off balance, and you lose a powerful component of strategy.

So, that's the game, but I haven't answered the original question, have I? 

In Practice

At the beginning of the year, we set up the behemoth that is Blitzkrieg for a try.  Nominally a two-player game, we decided to make it a four-player game by having two people per side.  This makes a match both competitive and collaborative, which I find more fun than a straight head to head.  Plus, Janice is smarter than me, so she ensures we don't make dumb mistakes.

Against us were two Travelers, Lorelei and Elijah.  Would youthful vigor defeat aged wisdom?

Because of Great Red's proximity to more minor countries, and also because of somewhat better planning, Janice and I were able to take four of the seven minor countries with fewer losses and more quickly than our opponents.  This was not decisive, but it didn't help the kids.

Now, with both sides directly facing each other, with troops at sea threatening each other's shores, the question was where the first blows would land.

We quickly identified the largest concentration of Red troops that could be "bottled up".  If they could be taken out of the fight, Red would lose much of its offensive capabilities.  Accordingly, we landed in force on the middle south, around Curry Bend.  A titanic battle began that would take several turns to resolve and suck up more and more forces from both sides.

But what's this?  Elijah and Lorelei had paid more attention to the rules than we did.  They parachuted across the desert into one of our vacant cities in the northeast and promptly flew in another 12 points of units, which went on to occupy even more of our hinterland!  Our rear was open to the wind, our supply threatened.

Well, two could play at that game.  We took two of their cities in the northwest and set up hedgehog defenses in the home country.  While it was scary to lose several cities, the fact was, we had plenty of formerly neutral nations to supply our units.  We were never in any danger of losing troops to supply restrictions.

Great Blue, on the other hand, could not withstand the loss of dozens of combat factors in the south.  With their main offensive strength crushed on Turn 5, it was clear that their days as a fighting force were ended.  And so we adjourned to watch Star Trek.

After Action Report

I took three things away from this session of Blitzkrieg.  The first is what every good general has learned: to crush the enemy, you must destroy their armies in the field.  Taking cities is all very nice, but so long as one side is losing more troops each turn than the other, and the number of troops lost exceeds the four replacement units per turn, an inexorable imbalance grows until defeat is inevitable.

Secondly, we determined that Big Red has an inherent advantage over Great Blue.  Having a contiguous nation with greater access to more minor countries is an incontrovertible advantage.  Not insurmountable for Blue, but worth noting.

Thirdly, yes, this game is a lot of fun.  Highly recommended.  Just know that it'll take longer than most games!  Each team's turn took about half an hour to plan followed by half an hour to play out.  Thus, our five turn game (plus setup and learning), took about 12 hours played over several sessions.

But it was worth it!

Join the Fun!

If all this talk of playing general stirs something your bones (and hey, it's a lot more fun and less harmful than actual fighting), you are warmly invited to join our Galactic Journey Wargaming Society.  We have been facilitating several play-by-mail games so that even players remote from each other can enjoy a contest: over the summer, we had a smashing good time killing each other in a friendly game of Diplomacy.

And you get a spiffy newsletter!  What are you waiting for?



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[November 6, 1965] Turns, Turns, Turns (Avalon Hill's Midway and Battle of the Bulge)

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by Gideon Marcus

For the Byrds

"To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn)" says the newest hit record by The Byrds.  It appears that America's premiere wargaming company, Avalon Hill, has taken this phrase to heart, releasing not one but two World War 2 themed games in the past year, one taking place in the sultry days just before summer, the other in the bleak frigidity of mid-December.

Midway and Battle of the Bulge both are significant departures from the games that preceded them (e.g. Afrika Korps, D-Day, Tactics II, Waterloo, Stalingrad, etc.) and both push the state of the art in armchair wargaming forward quite a bit.

Of course, as charter members of the Galactic Journey Wargaming Society, Janice, Lorelei, John, and I spent many hours giving these games a spin.  And you, luck readers, now get to see the fruits of our "labor"!

Midway

For seven months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese raged almost unopposed across the Pacific.  Their juggernaut rolled over Indonesia, the Phillipines, Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Guinea, and the American outpost of Wake Island.  Yet their primary goal, the elimination of the American navy, eluded them.  The Japanese doctrine was centered around a decisive fleet battle victory that would force the Americans to the negotiation table.

On June 4, 1942, the Japanese got their chance.  Six Japanese carriers and an invasion force steamed for the American island of Midway.  Three U.S. carriers were dispatched to prevent the island's capture.  Thanks to some expert code-breaking and a little luck, the Battle of Midway ended in a Japanese defeat, marking the high-water mark of their expansion.

But could it have gone differently?

Battleship for grownups

If you've ever played the Milton Bradley game Battleship, you already have an idea how Midway works.  Sort of.  Midway is actually two games in one.  The first takes place on a strategic board depicting the ocean around Midway island.  The Japanese fleet enters from the west in several groups while the American navy is arrayed in the east.  Each turn, both sides call out sections of the board to search with their scout aircraft.  If enemy ships are spotted, carriers (and the airfield on Midway) can launch aircraft to attack them. 

Only a limited number of sections can be searched per turn, depending on the nationality and disposition of ships, so there's a lot of cat and mouse to this portion of the game.  Whoever gets the first strike has an advantage, though a straight slugfest will tend to favor the Japanese as they have more planes.

Hornet's nest

The second portion of the game involves the actual plane to ship combat.  The defending player arranges their ships to maximize antiaircraft screening while the attacker arrays a combination of torpedo bombers, dive bombers, and escorting fighters to most effectively sink vessels.  No attacks can be made risk free, though it is always better to lose one or two planes in an assault if the yield is the loss of an enemy carrier deck.

Points are scored for vessels lost and the speed at which the Japanese take Midway.  Indeed, the Japanese can win their battles pretty handily, but just a turn or two delay or the loss of a key ship can cause them to lose the game on points.

That's what happened when John and I played — as the admiral of the Kidou Butai, I left the American navy at the bottom of the sea and took Midway, but the delay in my timeline caused me to come shy of my victory conditions by just a few points.

Scorecard

I appreciated the novelty of Midway.  It was quite different from the other wargames I had played to date, although, to be fair, I have not played Bismark, which I understand also has a search and evade dynamic.

Nevertheless, there just wasn't enough to the game to merit a lot of replay.  As much as I like ships and am an ardent Nipponophile, Midway failed to grab me.  John felt similarly.

Three stars.

Battle of the Bulge

Where Midway was the faltering step of a military at the height of its power, the Battle of the Bulge was the twilight of a fallen giant.  In December 1944, the Allied forces had steamrollered their way across France and the Low Countries, pushing the Nazi Reich back to its traditional Rhine border.  While it was clear that the war wouldn't be won by Christmas, it also seemed that the Germans, hard pressed in both the east and west, could no longer take any role other than the defensive.

This conclusion was wrong.

On December 16, 1944, an onslaught of panzers and troops smashed against a thinly defended point in the Ardennes forest — the same area the Germans had attacked on their way to Paris in May 1940.  Aided by a cloak of overcast, the Wehrmacht lanced into Belgium with the aim of dividing the British and American armies, seizing the port of Antwerp, and forcing the West to sue for a separate peace.  Within a few days, German troops had laid siege to the stubborn redoubt of Bastogne, and Tigers and Panthers were probing the banks of the Meuse river, an important allied defensive line.  By then, Hitler's last gasp had formed the shape on the ground for which this episode of the war was named.

Of course, we know how things ended.  The rugged defenders of Bastogne answered "Nuts" to calls for their surrender.  Allied reinforcements blunted and then repelled the Nazi advance.  The skies cleared up after Christmas allowing the overwhelming British and American air superiority to savage the German lines.  By early January 1945, the battle of the bulge was over, and Germany's ability to wage offensive war decisively destroyed.

What if?

Avalon Hill's newest game recreates this exciting (if preordained) battle in close detail.  Turns last just twelve hours, and units are represented down to the regiment/brigade level.  As with the game, Waterloo, the Germans start out with numerical superiority and have to work their way from one side of the map to the other against increasingly reinforced Allied lines.  Indeed, both Waterloo and Battle of the Bulge fight over practically the same real estate.  Poor little Belgium.  Victory is won by the German player if a sufficient number of troops is pushed across the Meuse and supported for 48 hours.  Alternatively, that number can be smaller if the Wehrmacht takes and holds the key towns of Clervaux, St. Vith, and Spa.

While many of the mechanics of the game look familiar at first blush, Battle of the Bulge represents a great departure from its predecessors.  For one thing, it has a completely different Combat Results Table.  Virtually all of the Avalon Hill games since Tactics II had used the same chart to determine the effects of combat.  This time, instead of just offering "eliminate", "retreat", and "exchange" (equal destruction of both forces) options, there are now also the results of "engaged" (which locks up units until the battle be decisively resolved) and "contact" (neither side inflicts any damage).

Roads and the holding thereof are critical.  Off the roads, troops and vehicles are slowed to a crawl.  On the roads, advances can slice deep into enemy territory.  However, such advances can only be made nilly-willy in the Basic Game; in the Advanced Game, there are supply considerations, which largely only affect the Germans.  If a Wehrmacht unit cannot trace a logistical path along roads back to the east side of the map without it being blocked by allied units or their surrounding "zones of control", it immediately loses much of its mobility.  After six turns of being cut off, surrounded units of either side cease to exist.

Treads hit the Road

In the first game, I played the Germans against John using the Basic Rules.  It was a handy victory, my panzers rushing with gay abandon behind the Allied lines and reaching the Meuse well before Christmas.  But without supply restrictions, the game felt little like a simulation of any real-world situation.

As it turned out, my next opponents were Janice and Lorelei, hot on the heels of an excellent and hard-fought game of Waterloo.  They enjoyed working together as a team (which made sense in both games as they played coalitions rather than single nations) and I appreciated the added challenge that came from matching wits with a double-brained foe.

Given the apparent German advantage in Battle of the Bulge, they needed every neuron they could get.  The Wehrmacht simply overwhelms the first few turns, and so long as the dice are reasonable, advance is swift.  The German assembles a ridiculous number of panzers to assault one spot, while assembling the rest into suite of two to one attacks, making sure to surround their prey.  Since no attacker deaths can result from either of these types of fights, the Huns can sweep through their resistance while taking very few casualties.

In the game we played, I don't feel the Allies made any specific mistakes and yet I reached the Meuse at around the same time as I had in my game with John, and I only lost a single unit in the process.  Needless to say, we'll have to play again (likely switching sides) to see if the issue is the game or just beginner's bad luck.  The current plan is to play a game starting December 16, 1965 and play through in "real-time". 

I'll be glad to play the good guys.  Putting on Wehrmacht gray makes me very uncomfortable.

Scorecard

As for rating, pending further study, I'd give Battle of the Bulge four stars.  It's definitely got replay value, and it's the most dynamic Avalon Hill game I've played to date with the possible exception of Afrika Korps.

Previews of Coming Attractions

It looks like Avalon Hill has managed to squeeze out one more title this year.  An advertisement for Blitzkrieg came with my latest catalog; it looks like it will be some kind of generic, division-level strategic game. Looks fun and customizable — needless to say, I've ordered my copy!

Join the Fun!

If all this talk of playing general stirs something your bones (and hey, it's a lot more fun and less harmful than actual fighting), you are warmly invited to join our Galactic Journey Wargaming Society.  We have been facilitating several play-by-mail games so that even players remote from each other can enjoy a contest: over the summer, we had a smashing good time killing each other in a friendly game of Diplomacy.

And you get a spiffy newsletter!  What are you waiting for?




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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[November 3, 1964] State of the Art of War(games)

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by Gideon Marcus

Where we stand

Just over a decade ago, there were no board wargames.  Back then, if you wanted to simulate the field of battle on a scale smaller than 1:1, your only real option was to buy or cast an army of tin soldiers and fight per the few various rules sets that had been developed. 

And people did just that, mind you, whether they were playing Fletcher Pratt's naval wargames or H.G. Wells' Little Wars.

In 1954, Charles S. Roberts started a modest revolution with his game, Tactics.  Now, armies could be represented with cardboard chits instead of expensive figures.  And for nearly ten years, Roberts stood as virtual king of an entire class of games.  With the exception of Games Research's Diplomacy, Roberts' company, Avalon Hill, produced every board wargame ever made.  By 1961, his company war producing two a year (as well as several general audience games).

But in December 1963, straitened circumstances caused Roberts to sell the company over to Eric Dott, head of Monarch Services, Avalon Hill's creditor.  Roberts' friend and colleague, Tom Shaw, is now at the helm.

This turnover does not seem to have affected the wargame company from Baltimore.  Two games have been launched this year, both World War 2 titles: Afrika Korps, a simulation of Rommel's drive in North Africa, and Midway, depicting the savage naval battle between Japan and the United States near the Pacific island base. 

Of course, I was bit by the gaming bug right at the start, and I've done my best to keep on top of all the new games.  With the exception of the poorly rated Chancellorsville and the obtuse Gettysburg, I think I've played them all.  And that means I get to share my experiences with you on the current state of the art of wargaming.  Read on…and perhaps you'll get bit by the bug!

Breakout

In 1958, Roberts developed a sequel to Tactics imaginatively called Tactics II.  This game didn't simulate an historical battle.  Instead, "Red" faced "Blue" in a match that was geographically dissimilar, but with identical armies.  It was with this game that Roberts popularized a number of elements common to wargames today.

First, the idea that (as opposed to chess or checkers) that you can move all of your pieces during your turn.  This was a revolution, and it took time for new players to wrap their heads around it!

The second was the "Combat Results Table" (CRT).  Tactics II set the mold for wargames, incorporating a movement phase followed by a combat phase.  All units that ended their turn next to an enemy had to fight them, the results of said battle determined by the roll of a die and consultation with the CRT.  At odds of 1 to 1, or even 2 to 1, it was a brutal chart — more dangerous to the attacker than the defender. 

But at 3 to 1, the attacker was assured of success.  The enemy would have to retreat or would be outright eliminated, sometimes taking an equal number of attackers with them.  The odds of defender elimination rose as the odds increased in favor of the attacker. 

It was a simple concept, and yet, so profound was its impact in its elegance, that the think tank, Rand, approached Roberts.  It seemed that his CRT was strikingly similar to ones they were using in their own games!  A sheepish Roberts explained that he'd made his in about 15 minutes, developed from the textbook maxim that odds of 3 to 1 were considered the minimum necessary to guarantee victory.

That's the history — how's the game?  Well, Janice and I took a stab at it, but quite frankly, it didn't appeal.  The lack of historical underpinning, and the complete parity of the forces gave us a sense of "why bother".  Perhaps if we'd played the advanced game, which has more bells and whistles.

Also, we had been spoiled by the more advanced games that Roberts developed in the '60s.  Once you see the improvements made, you'll understand what we mean.

So, two stars for Tactics II, but coupled with admiration for the revolution it was.

The Great Invasion

There is no question that the most "popular" war of the last several centuries is World War 2.  This makes sense — all of us served, or had family who served.  It was global and thus rich in settings and scenarios.  It was a "good" war with clear good guys and bad guys.

It's no surprise, then, that four of the last five wargames put out by Avalon Hill (and at least the next two, per early reports) all have WW2 as their setting.

The first in this series, D-Day, covers the most dramatic American land engagement of the war: the assault on and liberation of Nazi-occupied France.

As with Tactics II, a lot of firsts were introduced in this game.  Unlike its historical predecessors, Gettysburg,Chancellorsville, D-Day didn't simulate a battle but a whole theater of war.  Moreover, instead of having a fixed setup, with units occupying (more or less) the places they held on the eve of the depicted battle, D-Day is the first alternate history wargame.

For the Allied player may choose one of seven invasion beaches, Normandy among them.  And the Germans largely have free reign on how to set up their forces in anticipation.  This means that every game has the potential to be completely different from the last.

Another big distinguishing element from Tactics II, though it was pioneered in Chancellorsville, are the hexagonal "squares" on the mapboard.  This was an innovation Roberts definitely borrowed from Rand's wargames; these innovative hexes allow equidistant movement in six directions, as opposed to squares, on which diagonal movement is greater than movement through the sides.

Needless to say, my friend John and I were eager to try out this behemoth of a game.  After a false start — it's really easy to lose as the Germans if your setup is suboptimal — we settled down for a twenty hour slog across France.  The first time out, I'd done a simple storm across the Channel into Picardy.  This time, I was experimenting with the southern option, going in from the Mediterranean.  That meant I'd flanked most of the German defenses.  I got lucky and managed to spill out into central France before John could solidify his defense, and so, halfway through the game, I had all of my invasion forces ashore, arrayed against a precarious line of his troops.

What ensued was a methodical, tedious grind as I slowly pushed him back, hex by hex.  Attempts at clever breakthroughs involving paratroop operations in Holland resulted in failure.  Time and time again, 50/50 die rolls went against me.  Finally, at the banks of the Rhine, I made a couple of desperate die tosses…and lost.

We were highly impressed with the game at that point.  It had afforded us several sessions of entertainment and had come down to a virtual draw.  But there was a nagging feeling tugging at the back of our brains.  While the opening rounds of the game were exciting and varied, we had a suspicion that it always came down to the mid-game slog…and dozens of hours of grinding to a conclusion.

To explore our concerns, we teamed up, working on the optimum German defense.  We found that, no matter what, the Allies can always crack through somewhere, and at that point, it's just a matter of time before the Allied behemoth is on the continent, working its way toward the Reich. 

Conclusion: D-Day is a great game to play once or twice, but it pales after that.

Four stars for the first games.  Two beyond.

Duel in the Desert

The next two games that Avalon Hill released after D-Day were Waterloo and Stalingrad, games I have reviewed in prior articles.  The first was a set piece battle a la Chancellorsville; the second an operation monster similar to D-Day.

The latest release, Afrika Korps, lies somewhere inbetween the two in scope.  A simulation of the battle for North Africa, 1941-42, it pits a powerful, mobile German force against a ragtag but ever increasing band of Allied defenders.  As with prior releases, there are a couple of interesting innovations. 

For one, logistics is not abstract, as in D-Day, or not a concern at all, as in Waterloo.  Instead, supply trucks are physical units you drive around, and they are expended in an attack — which can leave your aggressors high and dry even after a successful assault!

Also, because of the scale and nature of the desert terrain, moving units along a road doesn't just confer a +1 movement bonus; you get a whopping +10!  Also, the Germans have an immortal Rommel unit who confers an additional +2 movement bonus to accompanying troops.  That means that there are German units that can move a ridiculous 24 hexes in a single turn.

That kind of mobility and the lack of defensive terrain (no river lines, for instance) makes for a much more fluid game.  Units dart around, forward and back, trying to encircle the enemy and cut them off from supply while at the same time, trying to prevent being encircled themselves.  Rather than a slow slogfest, like D-Day, Stalingrad, or even Waterloo to a degree, Afrika Korps affords and rewards daring play. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the game is luck based.  In order to keep the Germans from stomping the Allies, and to model the interdiction of Axis transport by the British navy, there is a chance every turn that the fascists' supply trucks don't show up.  Enough turns like that, and the Germans become unable to do much before the defenders build up their forces. 

Morever, the Axis must take both El Alamein and Tobruch to win, and assaulting Tobruch is always a risky proposition.  Afrika Korps, like its predecessors, uses the exact same CRT as Tactics II.  There's a one in three chance a powerful unit gets destroyed in a 3 to 1 attack, the best the Germans will be able to muster.  And if the Germans lose one of their two big tank units, that's a huge blow.  That's not counting all the supply die rolls, which are often 50/50.

What this boils down to is that there's an awful lot of luck that goes into each game.  That may be realistic, but it's also frustrating.  Janice and I had (and are having) a lot of fun playing Afrika Korps, but these issues make it hard to give it more than three stars.

Come out and play!

Financial difficulties aside, Avalon Hill knows it's got a growing audience.  To that end, the company has launched a bimonthly newsletter, The General, in which new games are announced, players discuss strategy, and lonely players find each other for local contests.  It's a brilliant idea, and while the articles range from mildly interesting to somewhat sophomoric, there's no question it helps knit the community together. 

Heck, it's even inspired us to build our own network of players.  Because whatever the issues with the individual games, wargaming is an exciting new hobby.  It stretches the mind, enhances understanding of history, and is a lot of fun.

Perhaps you fancy yourself a future Napoleon, Wavell, or Xenobia — come join us!  We'd love to swap war stories…

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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