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
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…
