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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