table for one

Table for One: France ’44 (Victory Games) Review

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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 drive 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

Cover detail from France '44 by Victory Games

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.

Cover artwork detail by Jim Talbot from France '44 by Victory Games

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.

Content overview of France '44 by Victory Games

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.)

Counter detail from France '44 by Victory Games

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…

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Table for One: James Bond 007 Assault! Game (Victory Games) Review

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Though best known for their complex, incisive wargames, some of which remain the best simulations of their subjects to date, Victory Games also needed to pay the bills. This assemblage of ex-SPI staffers, working as an imprint under Avalon Hill, produced far more than just wargames during its nine-year existence, and they were by no means averse to license work. Whether a “couples” trivia game featuring Dr. Ruth or a cooking-based roll-and-move made in conjunction with spice merchants McCormick-Schilling, the Victory Games catalog features a wide range of topics and game types that one might not expect from the same company responsible for conflict simulations with thousands of counters and dense rulebooks.

Their most famous licensed game came in the form of a role-playing game, the James Bond 007 RPG, arguably the finest spy RPG of all time. But Victory Games’ James Bond license wasn’t restricted to role-playing games; they produced a range of board games using the license as well. Most of these were children’s games, fairly simple point-to-point races loosely incorporating moments from the movies, but one marks a valiant attempt to create a wargame in the world of 007: the James Bond 007 Assault! Game.

Overview

James Bond 007 Assault! Game
Victory Games (VG), 1986
Designed by Gerard Christopher Klug

James Bond Assault! Game, Cover Detail

The James Bond 007 Assault! Game comes in a cardboard slipcase box with the same dimensions as Avalon Hill and Victory Games’ boxed wargames, which, at 8 and 3/8″ wide and 11 and 1/2″ long, annoyingly do not fit a standard Letter-size sheet of paper. The game includes one and a half die-cut countersheets with 264 5/8″ counters, plus a small third sheet with three specialized die-cut markers. The single map, of standard 22″ x 34″ dimensions, is matte printed on thick paper. A lidded plastic counter tray, much like those in other VG offerings, two d10, a single black-and-white saddle stapled rulebook, and a folded paper range stick round out the package.

Units portray individuals, either Soldiers or Leaders. Soldier units are numbered and have icons indicating their weapon type, while Leader units are all depicted with a central star icon; the named Leaders, heroes and villains alike, carry the character’s initials, while unnamed Leaders have a generic identifier. As a result, there’s nothing really distinguishing James Bond or Tiger Tanaka from other MI6 leaders beyond a “JB” or “TT” on the counter, something of a disappointment.

James Bond Assault! Game, Counter Details

Indeed, the counters lean heavily into the functional, acceptable in a more traditional wargame but less forgivable in a man-to-man tactical combat game based on a license noted for its strong visual iconography, from the gun-filigree on “007” to the Walther PPK. Perhaps space issues played a role, as even with the larger 5/8″ counter to work with, the numbers tend to the tiny, the legibility not helped by some of the color combinations.

The counter graphics are immediately identifiable as being from Victory Games; the unit counters, featuring numbers around the perimeter, with a central icon, could come straight from the Fleet series, if there were spies and ninjas in those games. Ted Koller, in charge of art here, helmed the graphics direction for many of the Fleet games as well, so the similarity makes sense. Counter quality in my copy was acceptable, with several counters coming close to losing text off the side due to a lack of printing margin and/or poor die cutting. (Monarch Avalon strikes again.) Side nibs do make a regrettable appearance, but only on a few counters per row, the majority of counters held to the tree by their corners alone.

James Bond Assault! Game, Partial Map Overview

The color map, covered not with a hex grid but with center-dotted 5/8″ squares, depicts the volcano lair from You Only Live Twice, where Blofeld and SPECTRE—er, make that Karl Skorpios and TAROT—have been launching rockets to steal American and Soviet spaceships. Due to the long-running dispute regarding the ownership of SPECTRE at the time, Victory Games was unable to use the nefarious organization or its members in any of their licensed products, so they dropped in Skorpios and TAROT as one-for-one replacements. (Karl Skorpios is not, of course, to be confused with Hank Scorpio…)

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Table for One: The China War (SPI/S&T) After-Action Report

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The China War (SPI/Strategy & Tactics 76, 1979)
Scenario Two: Objective: Hanoi! After-Action Report

Overview

The second of three scenarios in SPI’s The China War, Objective: Hanoi! covers a hypothetical Chinese attack on Vietnam and Laos in the 1980s, designed to preemptively prevent potential Vietnamese intervention in a wider Sino-Soviet conflict. The scenario lasts for ten turns, each of a week, with both players receiving Victory Points for eliminating enemy units and controlling six hexes, mostly large cities. The Vietnamese side controls all six victory hexes at game start, giving them an initial 57 VP advantage.

No optional rules are used, and the rules-as-written guide play, meaning that the barest sliver of mountain in a hex turns the entire hex into a mountain hex, with commensurate penalties for movement, combat, and stacking. In effect, the entire Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Laotian border becomes ringed with mountains. Suggested house rules—basically boiling down to appeals to common sense—would use predominant terrain, or crossed-hexside terrain, as determinant, but the rules-as-written hold sway in this playing.

Initial Thoughts

Objective: Hanoi! features fewer than twenty units on the Chinese side and a scant eight on the combined Vietnamese/Laotian side. Almost all of these units are corps/army in size. While the Chinese player can break down armies into three divisions each, the Vietnamese player cannot do so, almost certainly due to countermix limitations rather than any real-world tactical inability. As a result, the initial Vietnamese setup cannot cover all possible avenues of approach. Combined with the game system’s lack of zones of control, the Chinese will make headway somewhere right from the start.

The China War, Objective Hanoi!, Vietnamese/Laotian Setup
Vietnamese/Laotian Setup

I opt to place the strongest Vietnamese unit, a Mechanized corps, in Hanoi as a mobile reserve, with three Infantry corps lining the eastern border, from Haiphong through Cao Bang. The mountainous northern approach remains open. On the Laotian front, a Vietnamese Infantry corps sits in Dien Bien Phu, with the three weak Laotian Infantry divisions screening Vientiane.

The China War, Objective Hanoi!, PLA Setup
PLA Setup

Stacking limits in mountain hexes, three divisions or one army/corps, severely restrict the Chinese ability to mass firepower, so the main invasion thrust, some eleven first- and second-line PLA Infantry armies, will be directly towards Hanoi from the open region near Nanning. A “flying squadron” of two third-line PLA Infantry armies, backed by a lone Armored division and an Airborne division that can’t actually airdrop, will attempt to race in from Kunming in the north, hoping to encircle Hanoi from the west. The remainder of the Chinese forces set up to attack Laos, but the strong Vietnamese unit in Dien Bien Phu poses a threat to an already precarious supply line on that front. They may need to initiate another siege in that famous village.

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Table for One: The China War (SPI/S&T) Review

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Forty years on, it’s easy to forget that the Cold War trended hot in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The beginning of 1979 saw the Sino-Vietnamese War, a Chinese invasion of Vietnam ostensibly in response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Though relatively brief in terms of actual fighting, the political ramifications of the conflict lasted for years and raised the specter of a clash between the Soviet Union—Vietnam’s erstwhile benefactor—and China.

Having already published one game on a potential Sino-Soviet conflict in 1974’s The East is Red, the fervid design and development team at SPI revisited the concept in 1979 in light of contemporary developments, coming out with The China War. Far more than a remake of the earlier game, The China War attempts to model the state of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) after the end of the Cultural Revolution and with regard to its performance in the Sino-Vietnamese War, with the aim of envisioning what a war between the Soviet Union and China might look like. The resulting game is not quite subtle, but then neither would the conflict have been.

Overview

The China War: Sino-Soviet Conflict in the 1980s
Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), 1979
Strategy & Tactics 76
Designed by Brad Hessel

The China War, Cover Detail

The China War saw publication in two forms, as an issue game in Strategy & Tactics 76 (September/October 1979) and in a boxed format, a not-unusual publication approach for SPI’s magazine games at the time. The game comes with a single die-cut countersheet of 200 back printed half-inch counters with a matte finish and a single matte map that, in the magazine version at least, comes in slightly smaller than standard at 21.75 by 32.5 inches. The boxed version includes the rules and accompanying magazine article from S&T as separately staple-bound booklets.

Units are either Armies or Divisions, with the Chinese Armies equal in size to Corps in Western military parlance. The counters display particular unit types using standard NATO symbology. Surprisingly, none of the units have any formation designations; perhaps sufficient order of battle information was not available, as the earlier game The East is Red also lacks specific unit designations.

The China War, Counter Details

The counters themselves keep to the standard, pleasingly yeoman-like Simonsen-era SPI style, though the presence of cadre notations on the left side of the Soviet and Chinese counters results in an off-centered presentation for the unit symbol and combat factors, making those counters all seem slightly askew, with a fair bit of wasted space in the middle. The typical SPI counter color bleed on the countersheet at color transitions remains in effect here, as does the occasional counter that is a bit more or less than half an inch wide due to some wobble in the likely overworked cutting die.

Of note, the rules actually specify that these “variances” are acceptable and to be expected, such that “SPI cannot replace counters displaying these minor manufacturing innacuracies.” If it’s in the rules, I suppose one can’t complain…

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Table for One: Alert Force (Close Simulations) Review

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Most wargames slot the player into a particular job, a particular role: supreme commander, divisional general, platoon leader, even quartermaster. Alert Force, a 1983 “microgame” offering from Wayne Close and his publishing company, Close Simulations, provides gamers the quite unique opportunity to play as a member of the United States Air Force’s Security Police, the alert force guarding the flight line and the nuclear-armed alert bombers parked in readiness thereupon. Opposing the Security Police on this fictionalized depiction of a Strategic Air Command base, the other player takes the role of undifferentiated Terrorists, seeking to destroy the bombers, hamper operations, and even purloin a nuclear device if possible.

On the surface, Alert Force comes in as a simple man-to-man tactical combat game, with a tiny footprint, a thin sheaf of rules, and a quick play time, but some nuances in both scenario design and rules chrome make for a deeper presentation than the meager box might suggest. While not a groundbreaking game in any particular way, Alert Force nevertheless repays its brief time on the table with streamlined gameplay and an interesting, if obscure, premise. Indeed, you might just have to own a game company in order to get a game on this topic published.

Overview

Alert Force
Close Simulations, 1983
Designed by Wayne Close

Alert Force Cover Detail

Alert Force comes in a small cardboard tuck box, measuring slightly more than 4″ x 7″, fitting it squarely in the Microgame size range that was quite popular in the late-1970s and early-1980s. Two sheets of half-inch die cut counters are included, totaling 112 counters. A matte-printed tri-fold map (12″ x 14″), plastic storage bag, and thin saddle-stapled rulebook round out the package.

The counters represent armed individuals not with figures but with icons of the weapon type they carry: machine pistol, assault rifle, or machine gun; additional weapons, such as satchel charges and light anti-tank weapons, have their own counters, as do vehicles and the unarmed aircraft crews. Numbers on the counters indicate defense value and movement points; attack strengths are a function of the weapon type and range, and are listed on a side table.

The artwork is serviceable, clearly conveying needed information though without much in the way of flourish. Informational counters likewise show either unadorned words (damaged, incapacitated) or drawings of effects (craters, flames). Only a few colors are used (two shades of red and green), but again, while not fancy, they get the job done. The game comes entirely from the hand of Wayne Close, who, in addition to design, is credited with cover art, rulebook art, and map and counter graphics.

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Table for One: Murmansk 1941 (Decision Games/S&T) After-Action Report

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Murmansk 1941 (Decision Games/Strategy & Tactics 194, 1999)
Scenario One: The First Attack, July, 1941 After-Action Report

Overview

The first of three scenarios in Decision Games’ Forgotten Axis: Murmansk 1941, titled The First Attack, July, 1941, covers the initial German movement by the 2nd and 3rd Mountain Divisions from their positions near Petsamo (modern-day Pechenga) towards Soviet defensive positions held by border guard units and the 14th and 52nd Rifle Divisions along the Titovka River. The scenario lasts for twenty-four turns of indeterminate length, but each turn is probably less than a day, most likely twelve hours.

Murmansk 1941, German approach to the Titovka River

Victory in the scenario depends on occupation of two key locations—Titovka and Ura Guba, each worth 10 VP each to the side to last control it—with the Soviets earning an additional 10 VP if the Germans do not manage to cross the Litsa River. The Soviets earn a further 3 VP for each German step reduced, with the Germans earning a single VP for Soviet step reductions and 2 VP for eliminating a Soviet HQ unit.

Two optional rules were used for this playthrough: Formation Effectiveness, which shows the ebb and flow of divisional effectiveness as it engages in combat (usually through die roll modifiers to combat); and Auto-Victory, granting all combats at an odds ratio of 7:1 or better with an automatic elimination of the defender’s units with no losses to the attacker. Both optional rules favor the Germans, and they were used for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Initial Thoughts

Right off the bat, the Soviets hold a 20 VP advantage by controlling the two victory locations. To make matters worse for the German player, even a twenty-four turn scenario provides hardly near enough time to reach the furthest objective, Ura Guba, which sits a full fifty-one hexes from the German start lines. Certainly it’s feasible in theory; at a top speed of twelve hexes per turn, a German bicycle battalion could get there in five turns flat. But there’s the little matter of two Soviet divisions lined up along the length of the road to contend with…

With stacking limited to two units per hex in most cases, the single road threatens to jam up far too quickly for both German divisions, so my thought was to start one German division further south to draw Soviet forces towards them, hopefully thinning out the road defenses a bit. By threatening a Litsa crossing (worth 10 VP denied to the Soviets), they might allow the other division to attack a thinner defense.

Compounding German difficulties, the Combat Results Table threatens to harm the attacker almost as much as the defender, with the attacker susceptible to mandatory step losses on the higher odds columns. Throw in the doubling of losses when as few as six full strength units (attack and defense) participate in a combat and, in conjunction with the far greater VP the Soviets gain for German step losses, it’s a hard row to hoe indeed.

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