Review: 1944: Battle of the Bulge

  

 

The Battle of the Bulge, as the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944 has come to be known, would arguably be the most frequently gamed battle* (i.e., action limited in geography and duration) of the Second World War, certainly one of the most thoroughly researched.  The German army’s desperate counterattack and the subsequent rally and repulse by the Allied forces in the last weeks of 1944, was first represented in game form in 1965 with Battle of the Bulge (Avalon Hill, 1965).

Bucking the trend of borrowing a title from a Bulge history for his game, Dan Fournie’s 1944: Battle of the Bulge (Worthington Publishing, 2020) draws a suggestive line to back to Larry Pinsky and Thomas Shaw’s original wargame. 1944:BotB (please forgive the awkward abbreviation) is a division-level hex-and-counter wargame covering the period from the 16^th to the 25^th of December, 1944.

Appearance

1944:BotB comes in a sturdy 2” box in a nice matt finish, with muted grey cover art. On the back is a brief description of the game and the box-contents, and some details suggesting the games difficulty and solitaire suitability are both around two out of five. I’d concur with this estimation; rules-wise, this is not a hard game to pick up (though there is often a gap between learning how to play and learning how to win). As for solitaire play, 1944:BotB is definitely solo-able – I’ve done just that a couple of times – but it wouldn’t be a game I reach for first for a solitaire experience.

The game, resplendent (I've been experimenting .with playing on
my wife's sewing table to keep the dinner table clear.

The first thing you notice when you set up 1944: Battle of the Bulge is the map. 22’ x 34” and mounted, it’s a slightly schematised rendering of the Ardennes region (compared to, say, the Avalon Hill Bulge map), concentrating on the road network that was so crucial to the action. Personally, I like the map; I think it is effective as a play-area, the terrain types are easy to differentiate from hex to hex (these will affect movement and combat, and they’re not always clear (no pun intended) in other games’ maps). The colour palette is toned down, but evocative and effective. Towns, bridges, and entry-points – all crucial features for game-play – are clearly defined.

While game has a low counter density, the action plays out in a fairly constricted space. The entire space is criss-crossed with a network of roads and trails connecting towns and cities, and it’s along these paths that the meat of the game takes place. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The game doesn’t have any player aids (except for the two order of battle cards that I’ll come back to soon), but it doesn’t need them; everything you need to play the game – Turn and Resource Point tracks, a Terrain Effects Chart, and a handy step-loss guide for the multiple counter units – it all presented on the mounted map-board.

The counters are large, pre-rounded easy-punch tokens on good-quality, heavy cardstock, and with good registration. These are a joy to use, easy to read and to manipulate on the board, as are the much smaller circular status markers for recording which units have moved or fired, and which are in or out of supply. The package is completed with a handful of bright red custom dice, and one lonesome pipped d6 for rolling some effects. Everything about the game says sturdy and built to last.

December 16th (set-up at Turn 1), It all begins at the Siegfried Line.

Play

1944:BotB, like I think all Worthington games now, comes with a custom counter tray with gutters wide enough to accommodate the (not quite) 1" counters. This is a blessing and a curse. There is much more gutter space than is adequate for the counters that accompany the game. Because I have to store my games edge-ways, there is inevitably some shifting of counters within the gutters. I’ve put a lot of thought into this, but I still haven’t come across the best way to store the counters in the gutters without resorting to elastic bands to keep them in order. Here’s the reason why keeping the counters in order is a good thing.

Each side has an Order of Appearance card where you can set out all of the counters (with the multi-counter units in descending order), then place the starting counters as guided by the notes on the OoA card. Because of the movement of counters between plays, what should be a ten-or-so minute takes up the better part of half and hour. This is not a criticism of the game or the publisher – the fact that the Wylies provide a counter-tray at all is laudable and far exceeds what we expect from the industry. It’s one of those minor irritations that by no means reflects on the game play.

Allies Order of Battle (note the alternative split-division
7th and 10th Armor, bottom).

The rulebook comes to twelve pages, of which the first seven are core rules (the eighth is a full-page terrain Effects chart; this is replicated on the board). The next three pages are given over to Optional Rules (such as variable weather (historical weather conditions are given on the turn track) and German fuel shortages), and the Variable Objective cards. The final page-and-a-bit offers illustrated examples of movement combat and supply-tracing.

A lot of 1944:BotB will feel familiar to regular wargamers; movement is regulated by a hex-grid and modified by terrain types, units exert Zones of Control, damage taken by a unit is handled by step-loss, and drawing a line of supply for individual units is crucial for movement and combat, but only necessary when that bit it activated. One thing I haven’t seen all that often is the option to move to a target then attack, or to attack an adjacent unit, and then move. Markers are provided as mnemonic devices to keep track of which units have fought but have yet to move, or vice versa. This opens up whole vistas of tactical options to the unwary player.

German infantry, Para and armor divisions, including the notorious 150th SS
(using captured Shermans and American uniforms (edged green).

The box assures us that victory is attainable in two hours or less, and the game runs smoothly enough that this should be the case, but I’be bever played a game that didn’t come out closer to three hours because of the mixture of possibilities and constraints at play in eery turn of the game.

Anyone who’s played a Holdfast series game from Worthington will be familiar with the concept of Resource Points. Resource Points are the game’s currency, and like any currency, they are limited; the balance of RP changes over the course of the battle; at the beginning the Germans have the initiative, and they carry that momentum into the first three or four turns; their Resource Points amount to 20 for the first three turns, then begin to ebb from the fourth, at 18, while the Allies begin with just 6 RP and slowly build up from there. This proves t be an elegant way to impose the strictures the Germans were operating under, while reflecting the Allied command being caught off-guard and struggling to overcome their own inertia in the early days.

Resource Points can be spent in a number of ways. They can be used to bolster damaged units at a rate of one per step for Infantry and two per for mechanised. Activating a unit to move costs one RP. As does initiating combat, but here’s the interesting thing; attacking a single target with multiple units from the same formation (units from both sides have colour-coded affiliations for combat and tracing supply) will still only cost one RP.

Elements of the German Seventh Army tie up troublesome remnants of
the US Third army proving difficult to dislodge.

1944: Battle of the Bulge uses custom dice to resolve combat. In a fight, each side adds the fighting strength of the unit(s) involved, the attacker will add any additional support – a leader attending will add one die, artillery support will add another – and subtract any defensive bonuses the defender’s terrain offers. Both sides roll and the results are considered to be simultaneous (though even with the number of custom dice provided, sometimes you’re going to have to take tuns). Each custom die has four blank faces and two with symbols, one with an infantry cross, and the other with an oval representing armour. Each face rolled is a hit, and the owning player gets to distribute the hits he takes, but armour hits have to go on armoured units if they can. Armour on both sides took a hammering in the Ardennes, and this simple rule reflects that eloquently.

Variable Objective cards.

Another nice touch that extends the replayability of 1844:BotB is the inclusion of Variable Objective Cards. There are four of these, one representing the historical objective, while the other three offer “what-if” options for other strategic goals that were considered or at least floated in the planning rooms of the OKW. The German player can choose a card or pick one at random, and it will fall to the Allied player to decipher what the German’s ultimate goal is by where he prioritises his efforts. Lots of room for feints and big plays.

The roads are key to victory in 1944:BotB; you track your supply (and ensure your units’ combat effectiveness) by roads. Cross-country movement is possible – more so for infantry units and mechanised – but in a game lasting a mere ten tuns, the board can already seem very long when you’re trying to reach the other end without trudging through dense forest and snow. Moreover, a German victory is almost certainly going to rely on Victory Points from captured towns. It’s not impossible to gain a sudden-death win by exiting a full-strength German armoured unit off the map at a preordained point – I’ve seen it happen just once – but it’s nearly impossible, and requires a combination of spectacularly good rolls from the German player and abysmally poor ones from the Allies; not something you can rely on in a pinch. The more Control markers the German player can lay down during the game, the better their chances for a win.

The Moved and Attacked markers each feature a Finished backing: when
the second action is performed, you can flip the existing marker to note
the unit as done.

Appraisal

This blog is called A Fast Game is a Good Game because the current circumstances in my life dictate a need for games that offer a fulfilling experience in a few hours. Most of my play opportunities fall on a school night, so two-and-a-half to three hours is kind of my sweet-spot for a game (at this stage – retirement may change that some). Obviously I’m not the only one in this situation, because games like 1944:BotB are still getting published and remain popular.

In recent years Worthington Publishing has carved out a niche in the wargaming landscape, filling a desire for good quality games that play out in a limited time but that still deliver a satisfying play experience. I’ve said here before that I’ve never been disappointed by a Worthington game I’ve come across remarks on Facebook and elsewhere that Worthington games are too simple to be good wargames. I’m left wondering if the folks that make these kind of comments have ever played a Worthington wargame. I get that some people don’t like block games (like the Blue and Gray series, the Holdfast series, just about anything by Columbia), or they don’t like low counter density games, or they think a game can't be worth their while if it doesn't consume twenty or more hours of their lives. That's okay; wargaming is a broad church, and people can find succor where they may. I know what works for me.

The board features a Terrain Effects Chart, RP spend-costs and other useful tools.

1944:BtoB owes something to the Holdfast series of games. Its spiritual antecedent is Drop Zone: Sothern France (Worthington Publishing, ~2024), a game Fournie had in development with GMT for a while. About Operation: Rugby, the spearpoint of Operation: Dragoon – the second French landing on the Mediterranean coast in August of 1944. At this stage, it was intended to be a block game, reminiscent of Holdfast: Tunisia (Worthington Publishing,  and others. For reasons undivulged, it was taken off the P500 list, but not before Drop Zone had evolved from a block game to a multi-counter unit representation game. This allowed for some units to have five or even six steps, instead of the mere four a block would allow.

The DNA of Drop Zone is conspicuous in 1944:BotB, and in its – not quite sister, more cousin game, 1944: D-Day to the Rhine (Worthington Publishing, 2022). After hints of a release in 2021 and 2022 (to no avail). It seems that Worthington is firmer on getting Drop Zone to print – or at least to a Kickstarter campaign – in 2024. One can hope.

In the upset of the season, the 9th SS exits entry-point N2
 through Liege for a sudden death victory.

But back to the game at hand. 1944: Battle of the Bulge received a second printing, coinciding with the release of 1944: D-Day to the Rhine. It’s a popular game by small-press standards. I’ve tried to catalogue the reasons for that popularity here. To wit, it’s a solid, relatively fast-playing game (if you can minimise the analysis paralysis), that is enjoyable and leaves you thinking about what you could have done differently. It’s a that rewards repeated plays, and offers lessons in logistics, co-ordination of units and marshalling of forces that someone new to wargames can carry to other, deeper or more intricate games. In short, this one’s a keeper.

 

* If we were talking theatres, I’m sure the Eastern Front would edge out the Western Front for most frequently portrayed in a game, though I my collection I think they’d hit around the same number. That might be worth exploring sometime.