State of Play: WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden

 

  

Starting positions for the 82nd Airborne. Note the Activated marker on the 9th SS Cavalry;
the available SS units north of the Waal are caught completely off-guard in the first turn
(the afternoon/evening of September 17th. They will join the party in
the next turn (morning of the 18th).

After a gaming drought of six weeks due to sickness, travel and other commitments, T was finally available for a game this week. I should have set up the Hougoumont scenario from Waterloo 1815: Fallen Eagles II(Hexasim, 2022), which would have brought me up to five games ticked off my Ten Wargame Challenge list, but I had a special request from T to play another game instead.

A couple of the weeks we weren’t able to catch up, T was in the United States for a work conference, and he brought back a care package courtesy of the good folks at Noble Knight Games that I had sent to his hotel. This package consisted of the sadly out-of-print Radetzky’s March: the Road to Novara (Dissimula Edizioni, 2023), Napoleon’s Wheel: Danube Campaign, Part 1 (Operational Studies Group, 2020), and WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden (Compass Games, 2025). T and I played WWII Commander, Volume 1: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020) maybe a dozen times through 2023 and ’24, and enjoyed it, so of course, we were both keen to get Market Garden to the table.

This post won’t be a proper After Action Report; it will be more of collection of general impressions, along with pointing out a few of the points where the current game differs from Battle of the Bulge. The next time we play, I’ll offer a deeper interrogation of the game. In the meantime, I hope this is still of some interest and value to the reader.

Set up and nearly ready to play.It's not advisable to leave the dice
in the zip-loc baggie for rolling.

The object of the game is simple; the Allied forces have to secure as far along Hell’s Highway as they can within the sixteen turns available, while the German layer has to impede the Allies progress as much as they can and in whatever way they may. It’s kind of the reverse situation of Battle of the Bulge.

The game begins with the first on the ground of the American 82^nd and 101^st Airborne and the British 1^st Airborne in play, along with the forward elements of 30 Corps entering from the south (the left-hand end of the map). The German player has elements of the 1^st Parachute Army in the southern sector, ready for action, and some 11SS Panzer Corps units north of the Waal river, but these begin the first turn activated – they can and will defend themselves but cannot manoeuvre or attack.

The initial landing of the 1st Airborne, some miles west of Arnhem. I suffered some
analysis paralysis at to how to proceed with these guys, and they paid for it. 

Like Battle of the Bulge, each turn is broken down into half-hour phases. Starting with the Initiative holder – at the beginning of the game it’s the Allies – the players alternate playing phases, one on the hour, the other on the half-hour, until both have passed, or the end of the phase track is reached. Unlike BtoB, where each phase the units in a single area are activated, the players on their phase activate one or two units of their choice. Leg units can move from their area to an adjoining one, and motorised infantry and armour can move up to two consecutive areas but will be forced to stop in an area already holding an enemy unit.

 

Play experience

For anyone who has put time into WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge, the play experience will feel very similar. Movement and combat are essentially the same at BotB. Strategic movement works a little differently in Market Garden. Each side can still conduct strategic movement through areas they control, not passing through any contested areas, but there are some qualifiers. The Allies can only conduct strategic movement along the Club Route, the main highway leading north toward the operation’s strategic objectives. Also, both sides can only cross major bridges with one unit per activation. There are a few other stipulations about crossing water ways, but I’ll get into those in the next game report.

The opening situation in the south (the board orientation is Right board edge due north).
Things start out bad for 30 Corps.

One thing that slowed down the play with Battle of the Bulge was the stronger units having multiple counters to juggle. Some units had five or six steps, which meant the unit was represented by three separate counters, The game had this in common with 1944: Battle of the Bulge (Worthington, 2020), which coincidentally was released in the same year. As units took hits, a lot of time was spent on locating the reduced-strength counters for swapping out the lower-step counters. After a couple of games like this, I started placing the unit counters stacked together on the board. This saved maybe fifteen or twenty minutes of game time; we were sure to put the lost-step counters on our Order of Battle cards in case there were replacement points to be had. So, that’s how we played it with Market Garden.

When we play Napoleonics, T likes to play the French, and when we play WWII Europe, he likes to play the Germans. I think it’s less about history or victors and vanquished and more about an excuse to use a bad accent. I was happy to play the Allies because it allowed me to set the board up for the right orientation and best lighting for photos.

The situation near the beginning of turn 4. The 30th have made some progress, but not
enough. Those under-strength 9th SS Panzers in Eindhoven haven't been tackled yet,
and those tanks and mechanised infantry from the  107th can make Nuenen this turn
and trouble in the next. Meanwhile, the Club Route is becoming awfully congested.

I’d already set up the game, so when T arrived (a little late), I made coffee and we got into it. Being our first outing with the game, we were both a little tentative in our execution for the first couple of turns. By part way through the second turn, we’d got back into a rhythm with the rules and the game ran pretty smoothly, ignoring the early frustrations with combat (which I’ll come back to later).

 Didn’t get enough photos of the action to offer a blow-by-blow of the game. Suffice it to say, the action on both sides was a fairly uncoordinated mess but overall, it was a solid learning experience. You always learn more from your failures than from your successes, and I learnt a lot (if might take T a couple more times around the block).

The Germans fumbled their early response, but the Allies took too long to press the early advantages they had in boots on the ground; I tried to engage the enemy when I should have tried going around him early on. T, on the other hand, should have pulled back his weaker starting units to lay traps in defensible terrain like forest or cities (which would have lowered my to-hit chances by as much as two (from a 3 in 10 to a 1 in 10 in some cases), but instead tried to engage aggressively, to his detriment.

The game ended on turn 8 when I didn’t have an established supply route along the highway as far as the no. 10 star at Grave. Turn 8 had snuck up on me; I was aware of the sudden death provision built into turns 8, 10 an 12, but had taken my eye off the prize, focussing too much on the mess I’d let happen in the north with the 1^st Airborne.

 

Peculiarities

It is very hard to finish off a unit in a single attack. This can be frustrating on both sides, but it is how it should work at this scale. The to-hit ratios match those in the Battle of the Bulge game.

The chances to hit on a given die-roll are usually between 20% and 40%. Most units have a hit probability of 3 or less, and usually 4 or less for armour. Between T‘s rolls and mine, we didn’t get a single hit in the first four combat situations, maybe forty dice rolled between us. After that drought broke, the remaining instances of combat would have been roughly a 25% or so hit rate.

Art imitates life. End of turn 6 and the shitshow just gets worse for the Allies around
Nijmegen and west of Arnhem, with no sign relief from the 30th.

One odd thing unaccountably occurred throughout the game. From the third turn on, a weather roll is made; averse (Overcast) weather can affect the arrival of Allied airborne reinforcements in turns 3 and 7. On a roll of 3 to 10 on the AM turns, the weather is Overcast, on the PM turns the odds are a little better at 6-10 being Overcast. All six rolls from turns 3-8 saw clear skies. Moreover, on turns 4, 5 and 6 saw consecutive rolls of “1”. I don’t know what Compass does to their dice, but it sure keeps things interesting.

 

Mistakes were made

Given the duration since the last time we played a WWII Commander game, I didn’t want to bury the fun for T with rules-talk, especially for the first time out, so I ignored the supply-check rules (for this game only – I’ll work it in – and hammer it home – the next time Market Garden hits the table), and just concentrated on the particulars of movement and  combat. This wasn’t strictly a mistake so much as an omission, but it should have affected both the most southern German units and the 82^nd in and around Nijmegen.

Looking at the photos from the close of the game, I realise the control marker on the Wyler area (bottom edge, adjacent to the German E4 entry zone and the supply point for the 82^nd) should have come off as German motorised units were the last units to pass through it. I should have left one unit there to secure the supply for the Americans.

As the Allies, I needed to be more aggressively mobile generally, but especially on the Club Route. The ceiling of two friendly units in a single space prevented two sets of reinforcements from entering at De Groot (starting point of the Club Route) on their scheduled turns, and the 1^st Polish were prevented from dropping in to help the British 1^st AB west of Arnhem by congestion on the landing zones.

T sacrificed his southern on-board units too early, though I’m not going to tell him that; he can work it out for himself. I think I was more responsible than he was for the early German win, due to the aforementioned congestion at the top of the Club Route. By my reading, strategic movement for the Allies can run as far along the highway as the areas it passes through are under Allied control. If I’d been more aggressive from the get-go, I should have had a clear route as far as Grave by the start of the eighth turn, which would have kept me in the game at least until the tenth turn. But this is why we treat the first time out as a learning game; we both know we are going to screw things up out of unfamiliarity.

The game-state at the beginning of turn 8. 

Lessons Learned

The Allies need to make distance early on if they have any chance of making it past turn 10. Harassing German units will try to break the chain as you push forward, so you need to keep some mobile forces back to maintain the integrity of your supply line. The 82^nd and the British 1^st AB need to maintain the links to their supply points as well, but not at the expense of ignoring the prizes of Nijmegen and Arnhem bridges. That’s a big ask, but Reinforcement s can and will arrive if you don’t crowd the plate.

It’s possible for the Germans to achieve a sudden death victory if they can accrue seven or more unit-elimination Victory Points; this is both easier and harder than it sounds. Not every unit will yield VPs, but a number of the Allied units are worth 2VP if taken out. The difficulty in this approach is that the unit VP tracking is on a pendulum track, so as the Germans, you need to clout the Allies without you yourself being clouted too much. It could happen, but as the Germans you wouldn’t want to pin all your hopes on that avenue for success.

I can already state that WWII Commander: Market Garden is a hit with this limited audience, and it won’t be very long before it hits the table again. Check in in a week or two for a deeper look at the game.