D-Day Dice

Since we're talking about D-Day, let's linger a little longer and turn our attention to Emmanuel Aquin and his print-and-play game D-Day Dice. The game has thus far been available in a free trial version, as Aquin spread the word to generate interest. Now, it's being picked up for publication by Valley Games, and will be out by November of this year. A Kickstarter campaign should begin shortly, and I'll post a link when it goes live.

If you scroll to the bottom of the Valley Games page, you can download the trial version, print it out, and give it a test run. Based on a read-through of the rules, D-Day Dice appears to have an interesting mechanic, calling to mind a mashup of Roll Through the Ages and Memoir '44, with an added layer of depth. I'm going to print this one out and give it a spin, and I'm looking forward to trying the finished game.

H/T: W. Eric Martin

Review: Memoir '44

In preparation for reviewing the new Memoir 44 add-on, Winter Wars, I decided to do a full review of the original game. As I’ve said, age is irrelevant in determining what I’ll write about. Any game you haven’t played is new to you, and my goal is to get more people thinking of good games. Only time can reveal just what games have lasting qualities.

When Memoir ’44 came on the scene about 6 years ago, I gave it a pass. I’m an old grognard, which means a hardcore wargamer with a bookcase stuffed with high-complexity wargames from Avalon Hill, TSR, SSG, GMT, and The Gamers. A low-complexity historical wargame wasn’t to my taste.

Well, that was then. As I tried to nudge my son into historical wargaming, I used some standard introductory games, such as Gettysburg and Across Five Aprils, to introduce the concepts, but they failed to grip. He’d had a taste of Axis & Allies and various miniatures systems, and, being ten years old, he liked his bits and pieces.

So, I finally took a plunge into the wonderful world of Richard Borg, who has been refining an approachable system for wargaming for the past decade. What began with Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, 2000) has since grown into Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004), Commands & Colors (GMT, 2006), and BattleLore (Fantasy Flight, 2006), offering combat gaming in, respectively, the Civil War, World War II, the ancient world, and a fantasy setting.

Memoir ’44 would prove to be the perfect gateway for historical gaming. It’s not a design that purists would recognize as a true “wargame,” because it doesn’t simulate combat with depth and accuracy, and it doesn’t always reward real-world tactics. That wasn't Borg's goal. It is, instead, a strategy game that uses the elements of wargames and history to provide a unique, completely entertaining, and very appealing experience.

The Elements
Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, about $40) stands out for its high level of production design, which is what you’d expect of a product from Days of Wonder. This is just a game you want to open, fiddle with, play, and collect.

The components break down into a few elements that provide a foundation for an incredible range of gameplay. The board depicts a grassy expanse on one side, and a beachhead on the other. Both side are marked with a hexagonal grid. The gameplay surface is created by placing tiles on this board to create a unique battlefield. Tiles may depict towns, roads, forests, water, bridges, and obstacles, thus allowing you to build any kind of battlefield you like. (Other surfaces and tiles, featuring desert and snow terrains, are available separately.)

The most striking element of the Memoir series is its miniatures, which make the experience akin to playing a wargame with little plastic army guys. There’s infantry, artillery, and armor, as well as hedgehogs, barbed wire, and sandbags to use as obstacles and defenses.

Players activate and move these figures by using command cards, which allow them to maneuver within certain limitations, and provide different bonuses.

The Play
The rules provide 16 scenarios, complete with unit setups, victory conditions, and historical background for 2 players. The focus is on D-Day and the battles that followed, with Axis and Allies forces clashing across a variety of terrain configurations. If you have two sets of the game, or 1 set of the game plus the Operation Overlord add-on, you can play gigantic battles with two teams of multiple gamers controlling various portions of the battlefield.

The gameplay is simplicity itself. Each player gets a certain number of cards (usually 5) based on the scenario. Most of these effect unit activation, allowing a player to move and fight with the units in a certain area of the board (left, center, or right). Units are placed on the board in groups: 4 pieces to represent an infantry unit, 3 for armor, and 2 for artillery.

Combat results are determined with a simple roll of the dice based on the kind of unit that’s attacking and its range from the target. For instance, artillery can attack up to 6 spaces away. For the 2 closest spaces, it rolls 3 dice; 2 dice for the next two spaces, and 1 die for the spaces furthest away. If any of the dice are a hit, the unit being attacking removes 1 figure per hit. When all the figures are removed, that unit is considered destroyed. Modifiers, such as terrain, obstacles, and cards, can effect the outcome in various ways.

The Verdict
Using these simple rules, Richard Borg has created an immensely satisfying gameplay experience. Much of this has to do with the tactile element: it’s just a fun game to set up and play.

But the gameplay itself is also appealing. It’s fast, flexible, and provides plenty of opportunity for smart tactics and decision making.

No, it is not a “real” wargame. There's too much luck involved, the combat results are too generic and the mechanics too abstract for any Memoir scenario to function as a historical simulation.

And so what? I was a wargaming snob to bypass this one when it first came out. It took playing it with my son and viewing it through fresh eyes to see its merits. My rules for what make a good game have grown simpler as I get more experienced. (“Experienced” is a euphemism for “old” in case you’re wondering). My basic rule for determining a good game is this: a good game is one you play. Faced with a choice between setting up Terrible Swift Sword and banging out a couple of Memoir scenarios, I’ll choose Memoir every time. When you continually return to a game, that’s a pretty good indication of its quality.

Memoir is fun, and as I’ve refined my reviewing criteria over the years, that’s become one of my baseline quantifiers. I know that "Fun" should seem obvious obvious element in a game, but “Good” and “Fun” aren’t always found in the same package. There are plenty of games with rock-solid design that I find about as much fun as gargling ground glass. On the other hand, some games have obvious flaws that I’m willing to overlook because the net experience is entertaining. Maybe my brain is getting softer or my time is just getting shorter, but I find myself liking simpler things.

I don't have to make such allowances with Memoir '44: the design is rock solid. This is a keeper, and it’s great from both adults and kids as young as 10. If you have a son and you want to introduce him to tabletop World War II gaming, this is the place to start. Forget Axis & Allies. It’s a good game, but it focuses on sprawling, high-level strategies. (It’s really just a jumped-up version of Risk.) Memoir is closer to the action, and has a more immediate feel to it. It also plays faster, has more flexibility and better components, and is easier to set up.

Thanks to the continued success of the Memoir system, Days of Wonder has been able to keep up a steady stream of products, with new maps, scenarios, units, and add-ons. They even make a campaign bag to store everything. (I gotta get me one of them.)

I plan take a look at the new Winter Wars add-on as soon as I get some table-time with it.

Memoir '44: Winter Wars

If you haven't played Memoir '44 yet, you're missing one of the real treats of board gaming. It's easy to learn, fun, and incredibly flexible. I just got word from Days of Wonder that a new expansion is due in November. Called Winter Wars--The Ardennes Offensive, it covers the last major German offensive on the western front.

Here's what DoW has to say about it:

Packing a big punch, the Winter Wars expansion includes: 88 Winter terrain tiles; 20 Winter Combat cards; and most significantly in terms of game play – 80 new Command cards designed specifically for Breakthrough battles. This expansion also introduces new Winter Combat rules and new Troop badges representing the all new Tank Destroyer and Heavy Anti-Tank Gun units, and late war versions of an Anti-Tank Gun, Mortar and Machine Gun.

These will all be critical to fighting the ten scenarios contained in Winter Wars, all focused on those crucial two weeks in December 1944 in the Ardennes. The first six scenarios included are standard scenarios, playable with a single base game and this expansion. Deployment on a Winter/Desert board, while optional, creates a more accurate visual effect. The other four scenarios are gigantic Breakthrough renditions of the Battle of the Bulge. These scenarios will also require a single copy of the already released Eastern Front expansion and Breakthrough Kit board maps.

Winter Wars lists for $30.

Charles S. Roberts, Inventor of the Wargame, Dies at 80

The obituary was headlined “Charles S. Roberts, train line expert, dies at 80.” You could read the entire story and not realize they were describing one of the most important figures in the history of gaming.

Charles S. Roberts was indeed an expert on trains, which were his passion. He had several careers in his long life, but his most enduring achievement was as the inventor of the wargame.

Yes: you read that right. Charles Roberts invented the modern wargame. Movement on a grid (and later on hexes)? Combat results tables? Cardboard counters representing military units? Paper maps? Variable movement costs for different terrains? The entire idea of a packaged boardgame simulating military history?

All of it these things were the invention of Charles Roberts.

There were other forms of military gaming before Roberts: miniature soldiers on table-top terrain, or the “Little Wars” of H.G. Wells. But the modern wargame emerged from a game called Tactics.

In Tactics, two players moved little cardboard squares over a map. A grid printed on top of this map (hexes came later) helped regulated movement, while different kinds of terrain slowed or sped a unit’s progress. A combination of dice rolls and reference tables determined the results of combat encounters.

Robert invented Tactics in 1952. When no one was interested in publishing it, he sold it himself out of his garage in Avalon, Maryland. In the process, Roberts and his Avalon Game Company (later called Avalon Hill) would create an entirely new kind of adult boardgaming: complex, detailed, and historically based.

Two years after founding Avalon Hill, Roberts invented Gettysburg: the first boardgame to simulate an actual battle.

The games sold well, but Roberts couldn’t keep ahead of the printing costs. By 1962, his printer, Monarch, took over his company as repayment for his debts. They would run it for another 36 years, until mismanagement finally took it down. Hasbro picked up the pieces, and continues to publish updated versions of Avalon Hill’s more mainstream titles, but the glory days of tabletop wargaming are gone.

Wargames have faded from popularity. At first, they found a comfortable home on computers, where the calculations and setup were automated. In time, even those faded away, and now only handful of dedicated hobbyists still play historical simulations.

That’s a shame, because wargames are history you can hold. When you game a particular battle, you understand it far better than you could by simply reading about it. It’s almost like role-playing, as you try to make the decisions faced by the great battlefield commanders, and see how they may have turned out differently. Wargames require time, thought, and study: things that seem in short supply these days.

If you were a certain kind of boy in the 1960s and 1970s, this was one of the things you did. Dungeons & Dragons changed all that, and most young gamers drifted from historical gaming to fantasy RPGs, myself among them. I believe that without Roberts laying the groundwork, RPGs never would have even happened. He created a new kind of gamer, and proved that there was a market for long games with complex rules and lots of numbers.

Charles Roberts never set out to create a whole new hobby. He invented his first game as a way to study military tactics in preparation for joining the military. He never did join the military, but his designs and the company he founded changed the face of gaming.