Review: WWII Commander, Volume I: Battle of the Bulge

 

 

 

The best thing about having a blog that nearly nobody reads is you can be as self-indulgent as all get-out. Yes, there will be a review of WWII Commander, Vol. 1: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020) coming shortly, but you’ll have to wade through a sappy trip down memory lane first. Or, alternatively, you could just skip down to the Appearance heading in bold for the meat and potatoes.

John Butterfield was probably the first game designer to achieve name recognition for me (actually, maybe third, after Redmond Simonsen and Marc Miller). When I was about fourteen, I discovered all the possibilities of boardgames, when friend introduced me to a cavernous store tucked away behind a cinema complex, down an alleyway, up a rickety wooden staircase, and at the end of an unmarked passageway, called Simulations. This was my entry into a greater world.

Simulations sold all kinds of games. Here began my life-long appreciation of Traveller (GDW, 1977), back in the days of the little black books, and other RPGs like Boot Hill (TSR, 1979) and DragonQuest (SPI, 1980). They had a couple of tables set up for games in-store, and gondola stands full of D&D material and display cases with chess sets and jigsaws, but the back walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with wargames. Lots of SPI, Avalon Hill, Yaquinto, GDW titles and others, all beckoning. But I was a kid and broke; I couldn’t afford fancy boxed games.

What I could afford was the magazines, and some of the magazines came with games. To be honest, while I was interested in the historical wargames, I was also an avid science fiction reader, and it was SPI’s Ares magazine that drew me into the hobby first. And the second issue I bought – after issue 3, Barbarian Kings (SPI, 1980) – was issue 2, The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora (SPI, 1980). This was a Jim Dunnigan design which I enjoyed a lot, but the following year, Ares issue 6 came with a prequel game, Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora (SPI 1981), designed by none other than John Butterfield. Really loved that game! Played it to death; I had to tape the two halves of the map back together after the fold-hinge finally gave out. Not that long ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I nearly forked out an irresponsible amount of money for a second-hand copy mere weeks before GMT announced the inclusion of Away Team on their P500 list (click on this link to see the order page). But that’s a story for another time.

Which is all to say, Mr Butterfield designs fine, memorable games. The kind of games that stay with you after they’ve been reboxed and put back on the shelf. I don’t think I’m an obsessive an obsessive – I only own four or five – but like good bourbon, I’ve never met a John Butterfield game I didn’t like.

Set up for a two-handed solo game. Note the Orders of Battle and the slightly smaller
than average board (three-panels wide, or 22" by 25½").

Appearance

As I understand it, WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (hereafter referred to as WWIIC:BtoB) started its life as a computer game. I can’t speak to that; From what I’ve read elsewhere, while it had its critics, lots of people enjoyed it, and it was quite popular for a computer wargame.

Everything about WWIIC:BotB is rendered in a very limited colour palette (something it shares with other Bulge games). It’s an area movement game, and so the board is divided up into chunks of forest green, snowy white and sleety grey. The Allied and German units are similarly coloured in the familiar greens and greys (khaki for the British, but they only come on late in the game). But in spite of this, the board is a work of functional art. There is no waste here; the map represents the battle space well, creating a puzzle of roads and rivers, forests and clearings. Some of the chrome-y aspects of the game-play add to this puzzle-iness, but the game is never reduced to a puzzle. This is definitely a war-game, high level and streamlined to allow a faster play, but full of torturously difficult decision points at every impulse. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I tried a preservation defence here against the Germans, retreating in the first
 two days when I could, but still took a pounding early on. The black cubes
 are used to mark those units which have already activated
that day/turn. These are removed in housekeeping.

Aside from the Orders of Battle and the charts on the Player’s Aid Cards, everything is available on the board. There is a turn-track (turns are marked daily from December 16^th to 28^th plus a space for the German free activations prior to turn one), an impulse track for each side’s area activations, a casualty track at each end of the map, and three space pre-start German impulse mini-track. I’ll circle back to this soon.

I can appreciate the reasons why some people don’t like area movement in wargames (especially in World War Two situations). To be honest, I didn’t jump at WWIIC:BotB when it first hit the shelves for that very reason. It took a while, but I came around to trying the game, and I’m glad I did. I think the area movement makes perfect sense of the scale of the game (mostly divisions, some armies and a scattering of reduced formations). The battle space was constrained to the Ardennes region, and the fighting was close and brutal. This is something else I’ll come back to.

Big, readable counters! The number on the left is the starting dice for attack/
defence, the one on the right are the result-or-lower number for a hit. The plus
sign on the 116th Panzer means these guys are particularly aggressive and
get an extra die when attacking (defence is rolled on the straight number)..

The counters are large (2cm, or ⅘ inch), pre-rounded and nicely illustrated. The leg units are a simple soldier silhouette, while the motorised units are represented by their chief vehicle; Shermans and some Greyhounds for the Allies, Panzers and half-tracks for the Germans. Each unit is also identified by its designation and its divisional decal (tiny, but clearly visible on one corner of the counter). I really appreciate this kind of detail given to the game components.

The game also comes with two sets of wooden components; larger grey disc emblazoned with a white cross are used to mark German control of areas (unmarked areas are under Allied control), while the little black cubes are placed on top of unit markers after they have been activated for the day by movement or participation in combat. This can be handy in the confusion of battle.

A unit is out of supply when it can't trace a clear road through friendly-controlled areas
to a supply point (the the Germans, five points on the eastern map-edge, for the Allies,
just about any other road leading off the map). If these guys can hold out until the 23rd,
supplies can be air-dropped to them and they won't suffer step-attrition.

Play

The Rules for WWIIC:BotB are simple and very easy to pick up. So simple to learn that it’s become one of my go-to games for introducing new people to board wargaming. Movement values don’t appear on the counters. They don’t have to; there are a handful of movement conventions that carry across both sides with just a couple of exceptions. The turns are broken down into a series of impulses, which go back and forth, starting with the Germans. In an impulse, an area is selected for activation, and all the friendly units in that area may be activated. Foot (infantry) units may move from the area they are currently in into an adjoining area; motor units move like this, but if their movement follows the road network they can move two areas. Also, German motorised units and all allied unit may participate in “strategic movement,” moving up to three areas along roads so long as they don’t start, finish, or pass through a non-friendly controlled area.

All units have to stop in an area already occupied by an enemy unit, and once there neither side’s units can leave the area except by retreating after combat. If one side’s units are destroyed or retreat out of the contested area, the remaining side gains or regains control of the area. Area control is important for supply tracing, which we’ll come back to.

Sample page from the rulebook, showing illustrated examples of movement.
The rules a simple, clear, and don't get in the way of the game, once you
get to know all the exceptions.

Combat is performed with a handful of dice, aiming for target numbers of lower. Combat occurs after all movement in an impulse, when a unit moves into an enemy-occupied area, or when a unit or units already in a contested area are activated to fight.

Two numbers, in some cases three, are printed on the counters, the large number on the bottom-left represents the combat strength of the unit. This is the number of dice that unit will get to roll in combat. This number also represents the unit’s steps, the number of hits it can sustain before it is destroyed. The smaller number (or numbers) are the highest number required to score a hit (you want to roll low on your hit dice). This is the number in the black diamond, usually a 3 for leg units or a 4 for armour. Some units have a second number in a red diamond; these are elite armoured units, and they have a higher chance to hit against other mechanised units. The dice used are d10s, with the 0-face treated as a zero (no hit).

The overall number of dice can be adjusted by different factors; terrain advantages the defender and may shave as many as three dice off the attacker’s roll, while, for the German player, attacking an allied formation that happens to be within artillery range (noted on the board by a howitzer silhouette) adds another die to the mix. A hit can be shaken off by one or all of the defenders retreating to a friendly controlled space (the attacker doesn’t get the option to retreat), but just the one. Combat can be brutal, and while reinforcements start to trickle in at around the fifth turn, they are restricted to one or two steps per turn.

WWIIC:BotB is a game of constraints. Area movement means somewhat restricted movement, especially factoring in the three friendly-unit limit per area. There are lots of junctions to move from area to area, but roads are quicker, except only one unit can cross a bridge in an activation. Then there is the need to secure supply lines. The Germans need to make inroads quickly in the first two or three days (turns) of the game. From December 19 (turn 4) the German units have to check supply. The Allies have to do this from turn 1, but they have many more options for supply sources than the Germans, who need to trace a supply route – a clear road running entirely through German-controlled areas – back to the Eastern edge of the map. From here on, things only get harder for the aggressors.

That's not to say everything is going smoothly for the Allies. Before the action, the Ardennes region was seen by the allies as a backwater of the Western Front. Nobody in command through the Germans would try anything there, so it was treated as a quiet place where units that had taken severe punishment in the previous months could be parked to recover and rebuild their strength. These units, some down to 40% strength or less were the first to be engaged by the advancing Wehrmacht forces. At the beginning of the game, the German side gets three free impulses. Only leg units can be activated, but the German player gets a bonus die on each attack (during both the surprise round and the first turn) along with their Artillery bonus. With good planning and some lucky rolls, this can put the German player in the catbird seat for the coming offensive. 

German Surprise Turn track. I really love the graphic details incorporated into the game,
like the calendar and clock-face on the Day (turn) and Time (impulse) markers. 

On December 21, the German fuel shortages begin. This is one of the things I love about this game. Fuel shortages hampered everything the German army did at this stage o the war, but it was a particular issue for the Ardennes offensive, combined with the issues of supply-line integrity, traffic jams on the narrow forest roadways, and a handful of other logistical issues. At this scale, how do you effectively reflect these issues without adding another four or five pages of rules? Mr Butterfield’s solution is elegant in its simplicity. The game includes three yellow “Fuel Shortage” counters. At the beginning of the sixth turn, and every turn thereafter, the Allied player places these fuel shortage markers three motorised German units, at which time, the German player may remove two of them. The unit with the remaining fuel shortage marker doesn’t get to activate for that entire turn. Bad for the Germans, you say? It gets worse; in the last three turns, from December 26, the allied player places the three markers, but the German player only gets to remove one of them. This one simple rule captures a crucial element of the battle, imposing a significant constraint on play, while maintaining a level of player agency. Simply put, it’s brilliant.

The numbers marked in areas are modifiers for the number of dice an attack can bring
 to bear. In the instance of two numbers, the one in a square applies to the force which
has control of the area (the assumption being that the town is being held as a strongpoint),
while the terrain modifier is used for counter attacked against the invader (triangles for
rough ground, diamonds for dense forest).

Every second day from December 20, a sudden-death victory is possible by either side if the German Victory Point level is either higher than the German threshold indicated on the turn track, or lower than the Allied threshold. Neither is likely; most games will play out to the full thirteen turns, but it can get tantalisingly close to one or the other threshold sometimes.

I would call WWIIC:BotB an operational game that plays like a tactical game. Control of the road-junctions (like the five-way intersection at Bastogne) is crucial for both sides. Tactical advantages – the German player's initial advantages in pre-start attacks and artillery barrages, the opportunities for improved defences provided by terrain and river crossings for the Allies – must be subordinate to the side's operational goals. To win on the game's historical metrics, the German player has to not only punch a hole through steadily improving Allied defences, but also maintain an uninterrupted supply corridor to their spearhead. I've never attempted to get an early win on the Victory Point thresholds playing either side, but there might be something to a German strategy of reaping Victory Point-valued locations and targeting VP-yielding units like the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne, or conversely, having the Allies try to sneak in behind the German lines to liberate towns like St Vith and Bastogne to whittle away the German's points advantage. 

WWIIC:BotB is designed very much as a two-player game. Having said that, I played it two handed solitaire the first couple of times to get my head around the rules before I introduced anyone else to the game, but I’ve since played it more than a few times on my own because it’s such a challenging and rewarding experience.

Maintaining control of key intersections is crucial for maintenance of supply, while rivers
 can act as a defensive balk against massed attacking forces.

Appraisal

For a relatively simple game with a single objective for each side – for the Germans, achieve the victory conditions; for the Allies, thwart those efforts to whatever extent they can manage – the game proves to be eminently replayable. In all the times I’ve played WWIIC: BotB, two handed and against another player, I not yet seen a German victory. But in at least two-thirds of those games the Germans could still snatch a win from the jaws of defeat right up to the last handful of impulses.

It would be diminishing to insist WWIIC:BotB is a puzzle game. To a degree, every Bulge game is a puzzle game – how do we get an armoured division or two across the Meuse, intact and in supply, without the other guy noticing until it’s too late for him to do anything about it. Better to think of Bulge games – including this one – first as wargames, but with a more strenuously puzzle-y aspect to them than most. Brute force isn’t going to cut it alone, but it may be the single most important factor on the table. The hammer is the puzzle; where to apply it how much of it to save for the dash to the finish line. WWIIC: BotB brings this to the for in ways other Bulge games might obscure in the back and forth of combat. Its approach to the situation it models is reductive, dealing with division-sized elements on an area movement map and with limits on the numbers of friendly units allowed in a single area, but in that distillation comes a deeper appreciation of the situation, and of the difficulties stacked against both SHAEF and the OKW, and the leaders of both sides on the ground.

I don’t know if I can say this is my absolute favourite Bulge game. There are a lot of them out there, and I haven’t played all that many of them. Just last year. the late Dean Essig revisited the battle with Ardennes II (Multi-Man Publishing, 2023). Another Joh Butterfield design, Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass Games, 2015), a solitaire game that can also be played two-player, and Danny Parker’s The Last Gamble (Compass Games, ~2024), due for release this year, and Mark Simonitch’s Ardennes ’44 (GMT Games, 2003) is on GMT’s preorder list for its fourth printing. For a fast-playing, single map Bulge game, I think it’s probably neck-and-neck with Dan Fournie’s 1944: Battle of the Bulge (Worthington Publishing, 2020), and might just pip it at the post for the smaller footprint and comparative ease of set-up. I can say without reservation that I’m certain this is a game that will be making it to the table for years to come, and in the mean time, I’m really looking forward to seeing the series continued with Volume II: Market Garden, and any further volumes Mr Butterfield cares to design.