Axis and Allies: D-Day

View from the beachheads.

My friend Ian brought the Axis & Allies: D-Day boardgame round. As I’m still in recovery mode, I thought a boardgame would be less demanding. I'm not a regular boardgame player, so anything like this is quite a novelty.

I played the Allies. The Allied objective is to take and hold Caen, St Lo and Cherbourg. The Germans win if they prevent that.

The sequence of play is driven by a stack of cards. They are always in the same order and you play through the stack each turn. Interspersed ‘Fortune’ cards improve or degrade your performance of each action. Players are left with the choice of where to move and attack.

For the Allied player the main challenge of the game is how to divide resources between the three objectives. At one point I was contesting all three with some chance of winning the game, but the Germans retook St Lo and I just didn’t have enough resources left in the vicinity to counterattack.

The game is obviously quite abstract but I think it does quite a good job of capturing aspects and flavour of the Normandy campaign.

The game is fairly attritional - as was the reality. Playing through the card stack is rather repetitive but it speeds up each turn as some cards are single-use and discarded and you become more familiar with the sequence.

The game certainly works and would be good to play from time to time, but it’s not the sort of game I’d want to play regularly.

The only major design fault is the very small print on the order cards, which is extremely trying for anyone over 40. On those grounds I think this game is best left to younger players.

Further thoughts on Rommel

Rommel: End of the road...

Further to my last post, Little Wars TV also have a pretty astute review of Rommel here. They note the difficulty of adding historical flavour to a high level game, and see the Tactics in Rommel as Sam Mustafa’s way of providing it. Unfortunately, Tactics give players so much choice that they begin to slow an otherwise fast-moving game.

Sam’s decision to make the basic unit a company rather than a battalion was in my opinion extremely disappointing. The companies are little more than strength markers. They require you to have lots of stands, and they limit your ability to play large battles.

In LWTV’s D-Day game they took things up a level so the companies became battalions. You can get the scenario and the rule revisions under 'Free Stuff' once you have signed up. As you will see, the changes required were absolutely minimal and are contained in just a few sentences.

Notwithstanding the attraction of this option I remain unmotivated for a number of other reasons.

(1) IMO the success of high-level rules depends as much on the availability of historical scenarios as it does on the rules themselves. Sam Mustafa has not provided many scenarios for Rommel, relying instead on players to produce their own.

(2) Sam's publishing venture, Honour, used to have a proper forum where scenarios could be presented and rules discussed, but this was subsequently replaced by a private Facebook group, another bad decision and a complete barrier to anyone who doesn’t want any FB involvement.

So here we have a game that has failed to attract any other local champions, is only half done because it lacks scenarios, is effectively unsupported unless you want to surrender your life to Facebook, and would be better played at a totally different level from the one intended.

It looked full of promise, but those negatives just stack up in a crushingly large heap. If there was a local group of people keen to pursue it I’d give it another go, but I don’t have the energy and don’t see the point of going out on a limb when there are so many easier avenues to pursue.

What I’m looking out for now is a much higher, Operational level, game but as far as I'm concerned, it must come with a range of ready-made scenarios to attract my commitment.

D-Day with Rommel

My interest in Rommel nose-dived after I failed to get buy-in from other gamers and it has since fallen off even the back burner. However, a reader of this blog, Emjenic, suggsted my fellow gamers should take a look at the Rommel D-Day game on Little Wars TV. Here is one of the episodes.



I was excited to see this and thought it was an exceptionally good subject for Rommel. The game also looks particularly good. While I have a lot of other things to be going on with for now, it has made me think I should give Rommel another go.