After an overseas jaunt, T was back last week for a game. He texted me earlier in the day, “Still okay to invade Poland at your house tonight?” I understandably took that as a provocation; I thought about pulling out No Retreat! 3: Polish and French Fronts (GMT Games, 2018), but it’s been so long since I read the rules, I didn’t feel confident presenting it to someone new to the system. So, I thought, of invading France instead.
I’ve
been threatening T with Dunkirk: France, 1940 (Worthington Publishing, 2018)
for more than a year now. Sadly out-of-print, this is a stripped-down version
of the German invasion of France that brought an end to the Phoney War, the
event everyone knew was coming but, nevertheless, nobody had adequately
prepared for.
Initial game set-up. Draw cup on the other side of the board, coffee mug to the left
(to paraphrase Napoleon, this army runs on its java).
Dunkirk
is a block game played out on a fairly schematised map of western Europe, which
makes it into a tricky puzzle of manoeuvre and combat. Units have two-to-four
steps, indicated by a series of numbers on the edges of the unit blocks. The
strength values for units are interesting because they capture not only the
unit’s functioning strength, but also its cohesion and morale, with both the
potential for both the number of dice rolled in attack/defence and the target number
(that number or lower counts as a hit) both dropping with consecutive losses.
 |
| Block example: this is a three-step French unit with dwindling strength. You start off rolling three ten-sided dice looking for 3s or lower, but by the last step you're down to rolling a single die looking for a 1 or a 2 for a hit. The HQ marking indicates this is the Headquarters division for the 1st Army. |
The overall parameters of the game are pretty straight-forward. It is played over six turns. Infantry can move two spaces in unimpeded terrain, while mechanised and armoured units can move three spaces. Crossing a bridge will cost an extra movement point (this game-board has a lot of bridges), as will moving through the swampy area around Rotterdam. The play area is only twelve-by-twelve hexes, with regions cut out for the English Channel and the Maginot Line.
The
neutral forces (the Netherlands and Belgium) begin in the cities indicated in
their regions, one unit to a city. The Germans and French (and the BEF) have
some flexibility in set-up, but the German A and B formations have to always be
withing three hexes of their HQ (a designated block in the formation, marked
with a white box in one corner). The French formations are smaller but must
always be within two hexes of their HQ, reflecting the inferior communications of
the Allied forces and the brittle nature of the French leadership.
 |
| The cauldron. Actually, it's an oversized coffee cup, one of a pair we received as a wedding present, but the diameter and the curved interior bottom make it a perfect chit-draw cup. |
One of
the delights of this game is the use of simple mechanics to reflect historical
conditions. The order of play is dictated by a formation block draw – like the chit-pull
system used in Blind Swords series games and others, but with wooden blocks
instead of markers. In the first round, only the four German tokens, those of
the French 1st and 9th armies and the BEF, and the German
player gets to choose one token to be “drawn” first, so the Germans always
initiate the aggression. Draw tokens for the French 2nd and 7th
armies and the no-longer “neutral” forces are added in the second round, and
the French Reserve formation in the third.
The game is focussed on the German player, in that only the German side scores
points – through the Allies can act to mitigate the German’s score – and, to
mix things up a bit, the German player will, in the normal run of things,
choose at random one of six Strategy Cards outlining the Axis priorities in the
coming game, i.e., the player’s Main Objectives, Bonus Objectives and Victory Conditions
(the events or circumstances that will subtract points from the German players
VP quotient). The target number in each scenario is a 10-point or higher
threshold.
The drawn chits from turn 2, in sequence (Belgium is face down because, buy the time
it was drawn, there were no more Belgian troops to give orders to).
Anyone who
has played a game with a chit-draw activation system will be familiar with the
to-and-fro nature of the action, but this was T’s first experience of it. It’s not,
in itself a difficult concept, but it’s a mechanic that hasn’t come up in the
games we’ve played. T took to it pretty quickly, after a couple of early “Your
turn” moments. By the second round we had got into the rhythm of the game. T’s
Germans bulldozed through nearly all the Netherlander forces an a third of the
Belgians in the first turn. As previously stated, the neutral countries have their
activation tokens added to the mix in the in the second turn, but by the time
the Belgian token was drawn there were no more troops left to order.
The
German player earns victory points by taking control of certain towns and,
depending on the Strategy being played, wiping out particular formations. In
this case, it was the French 7th Army, which showed more resilience than
was historically true. In the south, the 9th Army put a defiant show
against the German A Group, sustaining heavy losses. Had we played through the
full six turns, a German victory was probable, but certainly not a given.
 |
| The map is simple but offers a lot of detail, including set-up areas for the French, British and German units. |
On NOT fighting to the bitter end
Learning/teaching
games always take longer, and T had arrived later than usual, so we called this
outing at the end of turn 4. Looking at the board, I thought T would have been
on his way to a likely win on points, in spite of a successful evacuation of all
of my BEF troops (a four-point reduction to his score). But even with the leg
up of not taking the second German A and B draw tokens out of the mix after turn
2, it wasn’t enough to secure victory.
At
close, T had taken control of Dunkirk and Calais for four points, and Atwerp,
Ghent and Brussels for another three. He had taken Eindhoven early in the
action, but ignored Rotterdam, which was still held by the remaining Dutch
division (one extra point) and hadn’t hadn’t yet reached Lille, though had the
game played out another round, Lille would probably have been secured. He had
four units out of the game at the end of turn 4 (one point lost for every two
units out) but would probably have been able to bring most of all of them back
into play if taken to the final turn. The escape of the BEF cost him another four
points, but even without that imposition T wouldn’t have had enough points to
reach the German Victory threshold of ten points.
Casualties of war: the end state at close of the fourth turn.
Being the
first time out (it was my third or fourth run at the game, but first against
another player), we weren’t taking the game too seriously. Next time no quarter
will be expected.
 |
| Pressure on the centre: the French Reserve mobilises while the 9th Army's Mechanised Division bravely stands against the tide of German armour. |
Mistakes were made
The decision
to play Dunkirk was a last-minute one, and while I remembered a lot of the nuances
of the game, there were two things that I forgot which would have benefited the
Allies. While the Belgians have troops in the Eben-Emael fortress, they roll
five(!) dice in defence, looking for threes or less. I played it as a straight
Infantry defence and the Belgians melted away like a morning dew. The correct
defence may not have lasted any longer, but may have shaved a little strength
off of the mighty German war-machine.
Play is
card-assisted with each side gaining a couple more cards each turn (like the
draw token inclusions, there are reminders of the card-draw numbers on the turn
track) Through the course of the game the German player draws a total of
sixteen cards, the Allied player draws nine. There is a slim chance the German
player may draw an event card that negates the Eban-Emael effect (an air
assault that historically neutralised the fort). It a lucky draw of one of the
Dynamo event cards in the second turn that allowed me to evacuate the BEW units
from Dunkirk and Calais, but the Allied player can’t conduct the evacuation
until the fourth turn.
Play is card-assisted. Players are restricted to one battle action per attack/defence,
but it just might tip the balance in their favour if it comes off.
The
other mistake was something I only recalled at the end of our game – that the
second A and B formation tokens were supposed to be removed after the second turn.
The blitzkrieg tactics are eventually blunted by the stiffening Allied resistance
and the stretching of their own supply lines. These however remained throughout
our abbreviate game. Thinking about it, taking them out may have freed enough
time to squeeze in at least a fifth round, but I think , having got to know the
system and the terrain a little better, we should be able to put in a full game
when we come back to it.
A typical roll: three dice, looking for 3s and lower.
No comments:
Post a Comment