[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

by Gideon Marcus

When you talk about destruction…

Two months ago, Jim Dunnigan started a revolution.  He took over the wargame fanzine, Strategy and Tactics, and not only worked to revitalize it, he started the novel practice of releasing a new wargame in it every issue!  Avalon Hill, the previous, undisputed king of the wargame publishers, comes out with one or two new games a year, whereas S&T plans to put out six to twelve (there are two in the current issue) of these magazine inserts in the same time—plus a whole line of regular releases.  In fact, a number of them are already out as limited series test prototypes, which some of my friends are playing.  Once they get through this round of testing, we should see some or all of them in a more finished form on our hobby store shelves.

Wow!

Last issue's wargame was Crete, which I was well pleased with.  The two games in this issue are Bastogne, which looks very cumbersome, and a cutey called Anzio Beachhead, which we've had a lot of fun with.  Let's take a look.

Reconnaissance

If the name strikes a chord, it's because we've already played a game with "Anzio" in the title—namely Anzio, which billed itself as "A Realistic Strategy Game of Forces in Italy… 1944"!

Which is funny because the game actually covers from the Salerno landings in September 1943.  Anzio is a strategic game that covers the entire Italian campaign in WW2, with invasions treated very abstractly.  The invasion of Anzio in January 1944 was planned as a flank of the Germany "Gustav Line", against which the Allies had stalled.  The hope was that the Allies could pierce through at a weak point and destabilize the German front.  Instead, the Allies were bottled up for four long months.  The front didn't move again until the Allies bashed headlong into the Gustav Line, and General Mark Clark took the Anzio forces to Rome, claiming the Italian capital concurrently with the invasion of Normandy.

(This was the wrong move, strategically—by going for glory instead of providing an anvil for the Allied hammer, against which the retreating Germans would be smashed, it meant that the Italian campaign remained an agonizing meatgrinder until the end of the war.)

But that's neither here nor there.  Anzio Beachhead depicts the landings and initial expansion at an operational level, covering the early part of the campaign.  In fact, it's by the same fellow who designed Anzio, Dave Williams.  Here's what Jim Dunnigan has to say about it:

"Anzio Beachhead was seen as another situation like the Bulge, where the attacker had a rapidly declining edge.  The original American commander was not bold, and lost.  So the idea with Anzio Beachhead was to explore the what if's.  At that time, I had been working on designing games for about eight years (since I first discovered the Avalon Hill games.) Before that, I was always interested in the details of history, and how they were connected.  Avalon Hill wargames were the first time I saw someone else thinking the same way, and doing it in a novel way. I was always building on that."

"I had been designing a similar game, called Italy, which incorporated the rest of the Italian theater, with a smaller scale map of the Anzio area (ie, two interrelated games, one strategic and the other operational).  But when Dave's game came in I thought it did a better job of the Anzio section.  We had come up with some of the same solutions, and his game was more compact and suitable for the magazine."

Vital Statistics

Anzio Beachhead seats two players and is seven turns long.  A complete game takes about 6 hours.  The map is black and white (I made a color version tinted with pastels).

The whole game takes two pages of rules, almost half of which are "optional rules", which we always played with. 

Instead of the traditional "Player one moves, then fights; Player two moves, then fights" sequence, each turn is divided into six impulses.  Each side gets two moves, while the other side gets a half-move inbetween, during which they can't move into an enemy's "zone of control" (the six hexes surrounding a unit).  Zones of Control (ZOCs) are really sticky.  You can't move from one to another, and if you move out, you can only move one space.  Thus, it's easy to slow an enemy unit down just by parking next to it.

Combat is pretty typical, adding combat factors of attackers and dividing them by the combat factors of the defenders, determining a ratio, rolling a die, and finding the result on the Combar Results Table.  Unlike Crete, but like most wargames, good results don't really happen for the attacker until 3-1. 1-1 isn't generally worth it.

There are some fiddly rules which allow the Allies to use naval guns and fighters to add strength to their troop stacks during one impulse per turn.  This becomes a fun game of trying to outthink the other.  The Allies cannot defend all of their pieces, but the German player can never know which defender is augmented.  A miscalculation can result in losing a lot of attackers!

If the Germans engage units with 30 or more strength factors on turns 4 and 5, there is the chance that the Allies will break morale, allowing the Germans to swarm the lines.  You can bet that those two turns will see a lot of action—sometimes desperate action.

The Germans win if they slaughter lots of Allies or if they manage to park units next to Anzio. The Allies win if they avoid that.

How does it play?!

After the initial irruption onto the map, which may not see a single combat, it's all defense for the Allies, setting up a defensive perimeter using rivers and cities as barriers. The Germans are looking for weak points in the line. Both sides have reinforcements come in, the Allies get most of them earlier, the Germans getting more later.

Allied play is fairly simple, if unforgiving.  Keep your lines strong and counterattack where appropriate.  German strategy is tougher.  A lot depends on understanding how to use the two movement turns, as there is no advance after combat rule.  The allies can break their lines to hit bad guys one hex away and then get back in line in phase 2, which is nice.  Indeed, as the Allies, many is the time I pounced south of the Asturia River to preemptively break up Germany attacks.

A good Allied player will not let the Germans have more than 2-1 odds at any point, to ensure that the Germans have to risk ugly exchanges.  Both the Germans and Allies have a few very powerful units, and those serve as anchors for defense, linchpins for assault.

Experience

I've played four games of Anzio Beachhead, and each was a different experience.  I lost as the Allies quickly in the first game because the rules say that the Germans can show up behind enemy lines at the Asturia River line unless you block it with your units' ZOCs.  I won as the Germans as quickly the second time, piercing the Allied line such that they never regained cohesion.

The last two games went down to the wire.  I was the Allies both times, winning the first game (the Germans couldn't quite collapse me fast enough) and losing the second game (bad luck, mostly).

There are some games where you can be pretty free-wheeling with your strategy.  Crete for instance.  Sure, throw yourself at the enemy at 1:1 and see what happens!  You might open up a hole.

Not so, Anzio Beachhead.  With two skilled players, every unit, every hex feels like the most critical, and a single wrong move could lose the game.  I know I played almost perfectly as the Allies except for abandoning Corroceto Station too early; this was barely balanced out by a less than optimal German placement early in the game.  Otherwise, it was like a rigorous chess match.

That kind of game can be exhausting, and it takes a long time.  There's no room for 85% thinking.  On the other hand… boy, it sure is rewarding when it all pays off!

Final thoughts

As Dunnigan said, wargames are all about "what if"s.  What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?  What if the Germans had won the Battle of the Bulge?  The interesting thing about Anzio Beachhead is that the what if is not "what if the Allies have broken through to Rome or crushed the Germany Wehrmacht in Italy?" because that was flatly impossible, no matter how well they'd done at Anzio.  As one person put it, "a corps was given an army's job."

I suppose the hypothetical is actually "what if the Germans had utterly crushed the Italian invasion?"  It would have given German forces more freedom of movement and been valuable for morale and propaganda purposes, but the long-term results would have been the same.  Either way, the ramifications are beyond the scope of the game.

But taken as a primer in operational invasions, it's a lot of fun, whether you're the Allies trying to make a bigger pimple in the Germany side, or the Germans trying to hurl the Allies back into the sea.  It's a taut game with a lot of interesting new mechanics, very evenly balanced.  Its only drawback is that it's a bit lengthy for what you get.

3.5 stars.

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

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