Wargaming boasts a few eternal chestnuts, conflicts and battles that publishers, designers, and, it must be said, gamers, just can’t get enough of: Waterloo, Gettysburg, Stalingrad, the Bulge, and, of course, D-Day. The evergreen popularity of these topics speaks to their role as hinges, moments when fates of empires and nations hang in the balance; one of wargaming’s attractions is the ability to revisit, in decidedly distanced form, the choices and challenges faced by the real-world combatants, to see how history might have unfolded differently or to understand why the cards played out as they did.
It’s a bold step, then, for Victory Games, that subsidiary of Avalon Hill comprised mostly of refugees from the lamented SPI, to have published France ’44, a game on the Allies’ drive to the Rhine in 1944 and 1945, that starts after D-Day and ends before V-E Day. No invasion, no desperate attempt to break out from the beachhead, no fear of being pushed back into the sea, no push deep into Germany once the Westwall falls. By the time July 1944—when the game starts—rolled around, the end of the war was scripted but not yet written, with plenty of hard miles between the bocage of Normandy and the shores of the Rhine but the destination little in doubt, plenty to build a game around. Still, without that strong hook of D-Day to grab gamers, how does France ’44 hope to compete with the dozens of similar games on the market? By turning the basic “rules” of wargaming on their dusty heads.
Overview
France ’44: The Allied Crusade in Europe
Victory Games, 1986
Designed by Mark Herman
France ’44 arrives in a standard Avalon Hill/Victory Games slipcase box, irritatingly sized at 8 and 3/8″ wide and 11 and 1/2″ long, just a smidge too small for a sheet of Letter-sized paper. (I would love to hear the story of just why AH made their boxes in such non-standard dimensions, with the concomitant shrinking of all the maps and booklets that needed to fit into them.) The cover artwork, by Jim Talbot, evocatively (if improbably) depicts a Sherman blazing away on the move at multiple enemies at once, the commander firing the cupola-mounted machine gun as the main armament looses a round.
The contents are such that the 2″ tall box feels cavernous by contrast: one saddle-stapled, black-and-white printed twenty-page rulebook; one matte map, printed on thick paper, measuring 22″ by 32″; a single, die-cut, back printed countersheet with 130 1/2″ inch counters (essentially a half-countersheet by modern reckoning); two d6; and a plastic counter tray with clear snap-on lid that fits snugly in the bottom of the box. Notably, all player charts and tables fit on the map, so that there are no loose tables. Such an economical format suggests that this might have seen life as a magazine game in Strategy & Tactics had it been submitted to SPI rather than VG, but it was marketed at a price of US$15 at the time. Though, of course, a game’s true worth is measured by more than its weight in paper.
In 2020, Compass Games re-released France ’44 in a “Designer Signature Edition,” a moniker Compass gives to previously published games that are gussied up (and usually super-sized) for a new audience, featuring a mounted map, a mini-map for the congested Normandy area, two countersheets (adding mostly informational markers), various charts and tables, and custom dice for the revised combat system. This review focuses solely on the original 1986 Victory Games release.
Armor units in France ’44 are divisions while infantry units are corps, with HQ units representing Army HQs. The counters, by art director Ted Koller, hew broadly to Victory Games’ simple yet pleasing palette, Allied units in olive green and German units in a greyish-tan. Standard NATO symbology differentiates unit types, and the various nationalities on the Allied side (American, British, French, Canadian, and Polish) are denoted by the color-fill on the unit symbol. Units receive historical Order of Battle denotations, but other than the British 79th Armored Division, which receives bonuses in certain combat situations thanks to its “Funnies,” the designations are for flavor and initial setup only. (Thankfully, VG does not apply differential colors or rules for the laughably “elite” German units that so many wargames insist on calling out as somehow worthy of special attention.)
The counters in my copy show very tight registration with no instances of color bleed or off-printing, and they round nicely with my handy dandy counter corner rounder. The cuts are not uniformly deep, requiring some extra X-Acto work here and there to remove them cleanly from the counter sheet and each other. The dreaded Avalon Hill/Victory Games side nibs—those attachment points to the countersheet that fall on the side of the counter rather than the corners—do make an appearance here, as in another VG game from 1986, James Bond 007 Assault!. Unlike corner nibs, which are easily removed, side nibs defy simple remediation and just look tacky. The side nibs are not consistent, nor indeed do they even appear with any degree of regularity or discernible pattern. One can but nod sagely, acknowledging that the ways of the Monarch-Avalon Printing Company will remain forever inscrutable…
The map primarily uses two colors, brown and green, plus blue for rivers, as it depicts the northern two-thirds (roughly) of France from the Atlantic coast through to Benelux and immediate environs of the Rhine in Germany at a scale of twenty miles to the hex. It’s striking to behold, and for someone like myself who greatly appreciates restraint in wargame graphic design (à la Redmond Simonsen), it looks a treat, clearly expressing what is going on with a minimum of fuss. Three oversized hexes at the bottom of the map represent Southern France, whence the units involved in Anvil/Dragoon make their way into play. The yellow hex grid borders denoting fortress hexes do fade out somewhat in some of the hexes, printed under the existing hex grid as though that color were laid down too early in the screen printing process. As noted, the various tables for each player—turn charts, reinforcements, replacement and supply tables, combat results tables, and so forth—occupy a significant part of the map, oriented so that each player has his/her tables facing upwards, which is ideal for two player play across a table but, for our purposes, rather awkward in solo play. The player-specific information is not referenced that frequently, so either craning one’s neck or just taking a picture of the other set of tables should suffice.
France ’44 does not include any scenarios; the main game, stretching nine turns of a month each from July 1944 to March 1945, is the only option for play.
Gameplay
Most wargamers have internalized a single set of “ur-rules” for wargaming, such that when learning a new game, it’s mostly a matter of figuring out which stylistic options this particular game has chosen: sticky Zones of Control?; friendly cancelling of ZoCs?; mandatory combats?; chit draw or I-Go-You-Go?; command and supply rules or free-for-all movement?; “bloody” Combat Result Tables or elimination via blocked retreats? Designer Mark Herman, inveterate rules tinkerer that he is, makes several alterations to the basic assumptions one brings to a wargame, most notably in movement and in combat.
Players purchase initiative chits, drawn blindly from a cup, using supply points. The points must be allocated at the start of a turn and apply to the next turn’s chits, requiring some forethought as to how one expects a turn to play out. Upon drawing a chit, the chosen player activates an HQ, which has the ability to command (activate) a set number of armored and infantry units of the proper nationalities—American HQs may only command American and French forces and French HQs may only command French units, while Canadian and British HQs may only command Canadian, British, Polish, and, for the British HQs, a single American unit. Once activated, the HQ must then decide on which flowchart of increments the combat units will undertake. For instance, an all-movement increment might be selected, where all units may move their full movement allowance (double if using Administrative Movement which restricts entry into ZoCs), but then no combat is allowed during the activation. Or a path with multiple opportunities for movement and combat could be selected, with only certain units (based on movement point allowance) being allowed to move, using only a fraction of their allowance in some cases, or conduct combat during the various increments in the path, depending on how far down the path (representing the passage of time) the player has moved. During each sequential increment, units may only fight or move; no ability exists for some units to fight and some to move in the same increment.
Figuring out which path to choose becomes the main gameplay hook—infantry is slow but has the muscle needed to breach hedgerows and force river crossings, but burning time moving them means the nimble armor cannot take advantage of breakthrough combat opportunities. Pursuit/advance after combat becomes a major means of moving units, which a crafty German player can exploit by steadily retreating as the Allied armies trundle forward—can’t advance after combat if there’s no combat, after all, and continually moving into ZoCs eats precious movement points, particularly in a game with no minimum move rule. The increment system is a clever attempt to fix one of board wargaming’s inherent dilemmas, namely that the turn-based movement of units one at a time does not reflect the reality of units in the field moving simultaneously on both sides of the front. In his notes in the rules, Mark Herman explains, “The point is that time has passed while one of your armed divisions has gone bopping up the road, and that passage of time is being applied to each of your units.” It takes some getting used to, but after a few turns the possibilities become internalized as you look at the map and attempt to understand where your units can go (and what, if anything, they can do when they get there).
At the game’s scale, however, which is putatively a very grand operational scale with month-long turns, the system just feels off, particularly when an HQ may be activated multiple times in a month while, owing to the paucity of initiative chits as the campaign grinds on, others might not activate at all. A month for thee but not a month for me? (An errata file floating around with a date of 1990 limits the ability of HQs to activate twice in a row, but the provenance of the errata is unclear, as the file lacks any sourcing, and still does not prevent multiple monthly activations of the same HQ.) As for the inability of activated units to attack and move at the same time, a battalion might find itself hard pressed to have its constituent parts both fight and move at the same time during the course of a day-long turn, assuming that the increment system also reflects staff work and orders dissemination, but an army can walk and chew gum at the same time, especially over the course of thirty days. Under the increment system, if one desires to maximize combat operations, the units not in the front line will simply not move. The temporal shenanigans that the increment system creates are almost as bad as those it attempts to solve.
There’s wisdom in forcing gamers to accept that you can’t do everything every turn, which certainly has an analogue in real-life warfare, but a typical France ’44 map during mid-game will look very little like a situation map of late 1944 France, particularly in the absence of any reason to attend to Atlantic France, which is denuded of combat units. Even conceding that the forces there during the war were mostly below the scale of the game, there are units in the play, such as the aforementioned 79th Armored and the US VIII Infantry Corps that spent time during the game’s scope in Brittany attempting to liberate Brest and Lorient, but the player has full use of them in the west instead.
Combat also comes in for some alterations from the norm. Units are rated for both set-piece and mobile combat, with infantry typically quite poor at the latter, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by armor, a form of overrun combat, almost. The most important consideration in combat in France ’44, however, is morale. Units with high morale take fewer casualties than those with lower in this combat system, which assigns each 2d6 die roll on a standard odds-based CRT not with a combat result but with an “index number” that is then cross-referenced against a table that provides a result based on the attacker and defender morale values and the type of combat (set-piece of mobile). Terrain provides defensive morale bonuses rather than die roll modifiers, and Allied airpower, when available, generates a point-and-apply morale loss.
Typically a game would factor morale into a die roll modifier or CRT column shift, most commonly as the differential between the attacker’s morale and the defender’s morale, but here they function as interdependent variables. High odds ratios run the risk of higher attacker casualties, but this can typically be negated if the attacker’s morale is of sufficient quality (or the defender’s of corresponding poorness). Because the range of results can be pre-determined based on the morale values in play, combat becomes a game of finding the right odds ratio to maximize defender casualties while minimizing attacker casualties, rather than throwing in the whole student body whenever possible. (Still, because pursuit after combat is one of the primary movement avenues for the Allies, more often than not everyone jumps in the fray regardless.) As with the increment system, this two-pronged approach to resolving combat becomes second nature after a few turns, and trying to protect the high morale units while still keeping them in the spearhead is an agreeable balancing act. The “new-fangled” combat system works better than the increment system, though the relative lack of forced retreats in the results can lead to very slow Allied progress should the German side stubbornly defend chokepoints, and the micromanaging of odds slows down gameplay considerably.
Victory comes through Allied control and/or occupation of several key cities in Germany and hexes on the far side of the Rhine, using a graduated scale that rewards the German player for keeping the Allies out of as many of those locations as possible. As Tony Curtis’ player notes point out, “The German player will have to work hard to prevent even a marginal Allied victory. There are never enough units and replacements to conduct a sustainable, in-depth defense of Germany.” Still, in my playings of the game, it’s not quite a walk-over for the Allies, even given their considerable qualitative and quantitative advantage in supply and materiel. (That may well be a function of my lacking a full appreciation of the nuances of the innovative game system or a testament to my opponent’s defensive nous, but since I played solo, I’ll wager on the former.)
Solo Play Suitability
Some of the best candidates for solitaire play are games for which you might be hard pressed to find an opponent, given the one-sided nature of the affair, and practically every game above the operational level on the end of World War II suffers from that fate. It’s a rare opponent who enjoys the challenge of taking it on the chin, turn after turn, retreating far more than attacking; if you have such an opponent, cherish him/her and always, always, bring beer to your game sessions as thanks. France’ 44 fits that mold, with the German side attempting to fall back in a manner that is more withdrawal than fighting—it’s quite feasible for the German player to never launch an attack at all. As such, the decisions there are mostly obvious if the mindset is to preserve force while still delaying the onrushing Allies, picking river lines and good terrain (hedgerows, fortresses, cities) to hold temporarily. Which is not to say that playing the German side lacks finesse—uncertainty as to when a defensive line will cut and run determines how many units the Allied side masses to break it, But by and large, this is a standard issue with all two-handed solo play, and the Allied side musters sufficient power that subtle feints can be run over as readily as stout defenses.
The initiative chit system inherently supports solo play, giving the German side a chance to react and preventing players from spending too long wearing the “hat” of the Allies. The game’s Reaction system does pose some quandaries, though not insuperable, for solo players, however. After an activation, the opposing player has the opportunity to spend a limited number of Reaction Points to activate either individual units or, for a three point expenditure, an entire army, before the next chit is pulled. It’s a powerful tool, and also the only means of moving HQ units, which curiously do not move at all during their respective activations. (Again, in a month, an Army HQ could move and still plan without much difficulty; I’m sure the G-3 guys were quite proficient at writing orders in the back of a bouncing 6×6. Limiting HQ movement to Reaction Point burns has a game-y feel to it.) Crucially, if the opposing player does not take the opportunity to use Reaction Points, the phasing player may do so, potentially setting up a double turn (or triple, depending on chit draw). To that end, the German player is well behooved to burn a point at every opportunity, to keep the Allied player from repositioning HQs or launching fresh offensives, so in practice, reaction on the German side is pretty much a given. Reaction Points not spent in the tit-for-tat inter-activation sequence are used in a final reaction phase at the end of the turn that cannot be preempted.
Aside from a semi-secret simultaneous allotment of supply to future initiative chits, France ’44 has no hidden information that would make playing both sides more challenging. The Allied player will almost always burn all available supply to fuel the offensive, being on a timetable, and the German player will make do as much on reaction points as initiative chits to move, so a token allowance there tends to suffice.
Instead, the real challenge in the game comes in attempting to herd the Allied armies across France, fighting the increment system and the slow yet steady German retreat in equal measure. There are no “Idiot Rules” requiring either side to enact historical patterns, no stand-and-die rules in Normandy nor a requirement to launch the Battle of the Bulge on the historical dates (or even at all); it’s fully a sandbox simulation. So the German defense will likely be far more competently run than in reality, made up for in part by the complete irrelevance of three-quarters of France during gameplay. France ’44 is an optimization puzzle, through and through, one that takes planning and careful consideration. Such games work best as solo affairs, I find, as running through a dozen options for each Allied activation takes time, and unless playing asynchronously via VASSAL PBeM—a nice module courtesy of Judd Vance, who developed the Compass reprint, exists to that purpose—it’s not quite fair to force an opponent to sit there and wait for his/her move that will likely take a fraction of the effort.
Final Die Roll
In a 2024 interview with Nathan Lee as part of a Victory Games retrospective, Mark Herman looks back at the critical reception of France ’44 upon its publication and comments, “everybody hated it,” though the initial sell-through of 16-17,000 copies (as opposed to the 25-35,000 or so typical of a VG print run at the time) would be a massive best seller for any publisher today. One can see why gamers might recoil at France ’44, from the facile measure of there not being much in the box to the massive shake-up in the rules of how a wargame “should” play. I share some of the trepidation at the increment mechanic in France ’44, as noted above, but not for the goring of any sacred cows; I find the attempt to wrestle with board wargaming’s inherently asynchronous nature to be both innovative and necessary. Indeed, I applaud the effort and think that at a smaller scale, there’s real application for it. However, I find the mismatch between what the game encourages via the increment system and how history played out to be at odds. There’s a case to be made that the increment system, in conjunction with the initiative chit draw mechanic, attempts to regulate not just time but tempo, orders loops, planning, and supply, factors far too often left behind in the service of good ol’ panzer pushin’. But it fits neither the scale nor the situation to my mind; a string of abandoned units that didn’t manage to stay in range of an HQ idling about France for months on end doesn’t mirror what happened in real life, no matter the ineptitude of the Supreme Commander driving the HQs.
France ’44 nonetheless manages to convey some of the frustrations and difficulties facing planners as they fanned out from Normandy, trying to keep armored units on leashes while prodding the infantry to get the lead out, all the while having to contend with annoying rearguards and tricky terrain. If you enjoy needing to plan several turns ahead while a pesky foe (even if yourself) throws wrenches into the mixer, then there’s value to be had in this solitaire-friendly package, and experiencing the game’s innovative, if slightly out-of-scale, systems provides a further worthwhile reason to grab a copy of the game. (The glut of copies on the second hand market after the Compass reprint means nice examples exist at very low price points, less even than the game’s original 1986 MSRP.) You won’t get an extremely accurate portrayal of the Normandy breakout and race to the Rhine, but the feel of the campaign, its ebbs and flows, its obstacles and victories, comes through quite well. For a game that doesn’t come close to filling its box, it breaks out of the box regardless.