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.

 

 

Stripped Down for Parts: WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden

  

 

The original photo from which the cover illustration for this game was drawn. 

John Butterfield’s WWII Commander Volume 1: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020), was a physical iteration of a computer game by Shenandoah Studios (an arm of Slitherine UL Ltd), which itself was a digital implementation of an earlier unpublished boardgame design. I’m a fan of the game (I’ve written up some AARs, and you can find a review here), and for some time I despaired that the “Volume 1“ in the title was a hollow promise. Well, Mr Butterfield and the good folks at Compass Games have come through with WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden (Compass Games, 2025). 

While not a perfect match, WWIIC: Market Garden’s box front is reminiscent of the Battle of the Bulge trade dress. Compass is always good at defining their series games, and a presentation in general. The cover features the famous photograph of British paras armed with Sten guns (the officer at the back carries a Browning pistol at the ready), picking their way through the ruined buildings of a Dutch town. Like its predecessor, the cover also announces that the game was indeed designed by John H. Butterfield (what game wouldn’t want to boldly declare this), that it is intended for two players and will require between one and three hours of your time.

The box-back. These days every Compass box is a sturdy construction. 

The top of the box-back features a quote I hadn’t come across before; Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, saying, “My country can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.” It’s a fitting epigram for the situation covered in the game.

The back of the box offers a teaser of the game map and some sample images of the “Premium oversize counters,” shown at pretty close to actual size (I’ll get to both of these in due course) and gives a brief explanation of the situation and the priorities for the two sides. The game-infographic tells us that the scale of the game-map areas (roughly) five kilometres (a tad over three miles) across and the turns are half a day in duration, and that the units are regiment to brigade level. It reiterates the two-player intention of the game, declares the solitaire suitability to be Medium, and advises, in contradiction to the other half of the box, that a game will likely run to 3-4 hours duration. After playing WWIIC: BotB quite a number of times now, I think this is the more trustworthy metric.

Besides the designer, the game credits single out Bob Heinzmann as the game’s developer (an important role in the creation of any game, and one that, to my mind, deserves more recognition), and the artwork was all provided by Bruce Yearian (who never disappoints). The Project Manager at the Compass-end of the endeavour was John Kranz. Mr Kranz, the founder of ConSimWorld.com and the ConSimWorld Expo, left Compass Games some time ago at time of writing, but I anticipate seeing his name name at least a few more games coming out this year or next. Hope things are going well, John.  

Both halves of the box enclosure are solid and, I’m pleased to say, cat-proof. What can I tell you? It’s a box, and we own a cat.

The rulebook. It's well laid out and very readable.

Market Garden's Rulebook is printed on the familiar, heavier-weight gloss paper we often see from Compass and runs to 28 pages. This might have been reduced to 24 with some cramming, but the rules are laid out in a nice, readable sans-serif font (the same as used in the previous volume), with plenty of illustrations and examples. Take out the Cover, Table of Contents/Introduction, components overview, two-page game set-up spread, Designer’s Notes and back-cover Terrain Effects Chart, and the actual rules come to a very easy to navigate 18 pages, which include a list of the differences between the earlier volume and this one.

Sample spread.

The differences between the two games are minor in and of themselves: a maximum two units from each side can be in a single area instead of three; activation is by individual units, not all units in a single area, but if you’re already familiar with WWIIC: BotB, most of the basics will be familiar.  

The game board. Once again, my crappy lighting doesn't do justice to the
stunning and beautifully utilitarian board.

Like its predecessor, Market Garden comes with a mounted map. Like a lot (though not all) mounted maps from Compass, this map-board sits out nearly perfectly flat right out of the box. I don’t know how the manufacturer gets this to work, but I’m hoping they can keep it up.

The Map-board is a full-sized 34” by 22”, a panel-width longer than the 25” by 22” Bulge map-board. The map itself takes up about two-thirds of the board space, with the rest accommodating the necessary Game-Turn and Time tracks and the pendulum Victory Point Track, as well as the Weather Result Table and a copy of the Terrain Effects Chart.

The play area represents the region along the Club Route from Luyksgestel in the south to Arnhem in the north (North is roughly the right-hand map edge). The game begins with paratroop units in place on the board at their historical landing places, catching the local German formations flat-footed. The region covered by the map is divided into areas. In a given activation foot units can move one area, while motorised and armor units can move two, assuming certain conditions are met. This isn’t going to sit well with everyone; I understand some gamers just don’t like area-movement games. Nothing I say here, or anywhere else on A Fast Game, is likely to change their minds on this. But if you’ve read this far, you’re probably not one of them.

The game counters come in two easy-punch counter sheets, and are very nice to use.
They are cut from a good weight board and, at an inch square, are very easy to read.
The Germans come in three greys (identifying their respective formations; the
II SS Panzer, 15th Army, and 1 Parachute Army), While the Allies wear
two shades of green (101st and 82nd), purple and rose (British
1st Airborne and 1st Polish), and khaki (British 30 Corps)

The counters are simple and effective, presenting the Unit name and type, starting space or arrival turn for reinforcements, the unit’s Strength (how many dice it rolls in attack/defence) and it chance of being hit (with a second to-hit for Elite Armor on armored units). And the unit counters are big – a full inch square – and pre-rounded. Some units are represented by multiple counters to allow a granular step loss.

Also included are admin for marking units Out of Supply / Low Supply (for the Airborne units), as well as Turn and Time markers and Weather reminder tokens. The game also features some wooden components that are technically markers but which I will get to shortly.

The German and Allied Orders of Battle. 

Each player has an Order of Battle card, with spaces for each unit and units with multiple counters are indicated by the counter templates showing counter stacks two or three deep. They are laid out with the starting counters in the top section, then grouped below by the turn entry, for ease of tracking. These sheets are a boon and I rejoice any time they appear in a game. I get that some people may find it tedious or double handling, and they do add to the footprint of the game, but I find it easier to stay in the flow of the game when I don’t have to rifle through the reinforcements looking for who is entering each turn – they’re already there and ready to be thrown into battle. Not literally thrown, of course; we're not barbarians - this isn’t Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004).

Two identical PACs are provided: no excuse for squabbling.

Market Garden comes with two duplicate Player Aid Cards. The front presents a detailed Sequence of Play and a distillation of the Movement rules. The verso outlines the rules for Combat, Supply, and establishing Victory. At the bottom of the card is a helpful key to reading the counters, and a breakdown of the formation colour-coding and unit types represented.

This is what greets you when you remove the box top.

The game comes with seven dice which, based on my experience with WWIIC:BotB, will be enough for most incidents of battle; actually, given the reduction of units available in a given space from three to two, I doubt you will need to reroll any dice at all in Market Garden.

Two bags of wooden markers also come with the game. The green discs are Area Control markers. In the WWII Commander series, the aggressor marks areas captured and held with these discs. In WWIIC:BotB these were grey and screen-printed with a balkenkreuz; here, with the Allies attacking, a white star adorns the green discs.

Clockwise from top: black "Activated " markers and green Allied Control markers
(both of these are wooden components); seven d10s; and a bag of baggies,
sufficient in number for the needs of the game.

The second set is a bag of wooden cubes. These are used to mark units that have been activated in the turn. Each unit only gets one activation, so a black cube placed is on top after each has acted, then these are cleared from the board in the housekeeping phase at the end of the turn. Both components are very effective in appearance and function and add a measure of gravity to the situation. The purpose could have just as easily been accomplished with extra sheet of counters, but I’m heartened that Compass has persisted with the wooden components.

-----

That about covers it for WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden. As I mentioned at the start, I really like Volume 1, and I’m very please the promise of a series has come to fruition. Apart from some minor amendments to the rules, Market Garden should keep the best characteristics of its sibling game, fast, engaging play and difficult choices with every turn. But this won’t simply be more of the same; looking at the map I can see different challenges to try to nut out over successive plays. T, my regular opponent, is also keen to give this a try, so look out for an AAR soon.

 

   

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.

 

   

Stripped Down for Parts: World War II Commander: Battle of the Bulge

 

 

I wasn’t sure I really needed another Bulge game, but there were a couple of things at play with WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020). Firstly, it’s a John Butterfield game. Butterfield is a legend in game design, with a particular focus on solo games. He was one of the first designers I recognised by name. When I was a kid, just getting into gaming, he designed two of my favourite solo games, The Wreck of the BSM Pandora (SPI, 1980), and Voyage of the BSM Pandora* (SPI, 1981), both of which first appeared in Ares Magazine. Since then, he’s produced such renowned classics as RAF: Battle of Britain (West End Games, 1986; Decision Games, 2009), and Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass Games, 2015) and Charles S. Roberts Award-nominated Enemy Action: Kharkov (Compass Games, 2022), to name but a few. The guy makes solid games.

Secondly, it looked for a while like the Bulge game was going to be a one-off, despite the series title and badging. But earlier this year, Bill from Compass Games announced that the second game in the series should be coming out around the first quarter of 2024, and that will be WWII Commander: Market Garden (Compass Games, ~2024). Now, to me, Operation Market Garden is one of the most fascinating situations in the European theatre, so on hearing this, I wanted to try out the system ahead of its release.  

Looking at the back of the box, the publisher advises that the game is of a low complexity level with high solitaire suitability, and that the average play-time is 1-3 hours. These are all big ticks in my book. Reading the description, we find this is actually a physical re-implementation of a Boardgame style computer-based wargame Butterfield developed for Shenandoah Studios. I don’t have a lot of experience with computer versions of board wargames (I did play way too much Panzer General on my flat-mate’s computer during the second year of my degree), but I confess this was one of the things that put me off trying WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge before now.

The box back also gives a list of the components in the game, but it doesn’t go into very much detail, so I’ll go through the list and elaborate a little on what you can expect.

Mounted map: the game comes with a 22” by 26” mounted map, a panel-width narrower than what I think if as a full-sized (22” by 34”) map, but there is a lot of game packed into this reduced space. The actual play area takes up most of the board. This is a map of the region the battle was fought, a patchwork of dense forest, patchy woods and small towns, criss-crossed with a network of roads and cart-trails. In this case, it’s really a patchwork map. One of the key design decisions on the WWII Commander series has been to go with area movement, with district borders and rivers remarking one area from the next. This isn’t the first Bulge game to use area movement; the first of the FAB (Fast Action Battle) series of games, FAB: the Bulge (GMT Games, 2008) has a full-sized, slightly more complicated area-movement map of the same region. This was the other reason for my initial reluctance to buy into the WWII Commander series. I own the other two volumes in the FAB series – I like FAB: Golan ’73; I haven’t played FAB: Sicily, but it looks promising – and I was hoping for a reprint of The Bulge. Alas, GMT has made the decision to close the FAB series.**

The map itself is a clear representation of the Ardennes region over which the battle took place. A lot of ink has been spilt over the difficulty of reading some Bulge game maps (I’m not going to single anyone out here), but it don’t think anyone will have a problem with this rendition. The map is quite gorgeous in its own wintery way. The roads and sector-borders are clearly presented, and unobtrusive symbols on the eastern-most areas mark out the range of the German artillery without disturbing the representative terrain. The whole thing is evocative of heavy woods and deep, dirty snow.

Turn and Time tracks in detail.

The map board also incorporates the map legend, Victory Point track, turn track and day track. Each day is divided up into nine functional time periods across the course of the day, with the two sides getting to commit one action each during each period. The Germans get a bonus action at the beginning of the day, and the Allies get their bonus action at the end of the day cycle, then the day marker moves up to the next calendar day the battle recommences.

One more thing worth mentioning; the map board sat almost perfectly flat right out of the box. I like a mounted board, but a bard that you can play om without leaving a couple of 3” boxes sitting on the folds for an hour or so ahead of time to press the kinks out is something to be cherished.

Two sheets of Counters. The game comes with two sheets of easy-punch counters; the unit counters are a forgiving 0.75-nch and represent divisional level forces in the combat. The sheets also offer Turn and VP track markers and smaller circular fuel shortage and out of supply markers. The graphics are simple and easily readable. Infantry is represented by a generic soldier, while the mechanised infantry and armour are represented by a silhouette of the predominant vehicle of that division. The counters are little pre-rounded works of efficiency, with the divisional designation and logo I the top right and top left corners respectively. The number in the bottom left corner is the unit’s strength (the number of dice rolled in combat), while the number(s) in the diamond on the right are the to-hit chances; you need to roll that number or less to score a hit on a die. Some armour as two diamonds with differing number. These are elite armour units, the higher number (in the red diamond) is the to-hit while attacking, the lower number (in the black diamond) is the to-hit while defending. A lot of the units – mostly armour, but also some infantry units – have more than two steps, so two or even three counters may represent the same unit. The counter density for the game is relatively low, which isn’t a bad thing in an area movement game.

The astute reader will have noticed the lack of a movement rating on the unit counters. Manoeuvre in the Ardennes was difficult at best – and often near-impossible – for both sides of the fight. The movement rules in WWII Commander capture this difficulty simply and elegantly; leg infantry in the game can move from one section to another section in a turn. Motorised infantry and armour can move one section, or two in certain circumstances. Manoeuvre is still a crucial element in the game, but you’re going to have to plan ahead, and have a back-up when things don’t go the way you expected.

Rules Booklet. The rules for WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge are tight and well-written, with lots of illustrations for rules examples, and they come in at a scant twenty pages (including scenario set-up notes). In my experience, Butterfield has a good feel for rules, conveying sometimes complex concepts in an understandable way (or maybe he just has exceptional developers to work with).

Sample spread from the rulebook.

Order of Battle cards.

Two Orders of Battle. WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge also include two orders of battle cards, one for each side in the battle. I’m a big fan of orders of battle; they are a good way of keeping track of multi-step unit pieces, as well as keeping your reinforcements on order. And with the smaller gameboard footprint, they’re not a big an imposition on the table.

PACs, front and back.

Two identical Player’s Aid Cards. The PACs for the game are excellent; double-sided, they cover all the basics of the game; Sequence of Play, Movement, Combat, Supply Sources and Out of Supply/Fuel Shortage Rules and the exception rules around Surprise Turns are all covered briefly and succinctly, all without resorting to 6-point font.  

Play Sequence Example Card. Not included in the box-back roster is a turn example sheet. This might seem superfluous to some, but after reading the rules I was a little confused about how the turn-order actually plays out. This cleared it right up. This is something for which I’ll take my hat off to Compass Games; every game that comes down the pike has a senior staff member shepherding it along, and they have the power to delay a release if they don’t think it’s quite there yet, or if it just needs an extra component or an explanatory note. This looks like what was the case with Battle of the Bulge, and I’m really grateful to whoever saw the need and took the time over this.

50 Activation markers, 40 German control counters, and seven 10-sided dice. Units can only be activated once in a turn and the tuns each have nine rounds, so the little black wooden cubes are used to indicate which units have been activated. This could have been done with another half-sheet of counters, but the cubes lend a nice tactile experience and are a good visual prompt for both sides. 

The same goes for the German control counters. Sector control in the game is crucial in identifying whether or not a unit is in supply. The Germans begin controlling eight of the eastern-most areas on the board. Each area the German player gains control over is marked with a stenciled wooden disc.

Again, this could have probably been done with cardboard counters, but the screen-printed grey discs that make a little clicking sound when placed on the mounted board add a level of verisimilitude to the experience of play, a reminder that losing or gaining a sector will have consequences for your game.

The dice are good high-impact plastic stock ten-siders, with running 0-9. These will also have consequences for your game.

Box and lid set. This seems obvious, but games haven’t always necessarily come in a box. That said, the Compass Games material I’ve bought in the past has fluctuated in box quality a little. Everything I have bought recently has been in a good, well-fitting box and lid set, but I don’t know if that’s been a general move away from the lighter cardstock boxes I’ve seen in games like Revolution Road (Compass Games, 2017), or if the sturdier boxes are reserved for flagship products and series games. Time will tell, I guess.

All in all, WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge looks like it will offer what it sets out to, a fairly broad-brushstroke, divisional level wargame portraying a particularly tough situation for both sides; glancing though the rules, I think three hours might be a little hopeful for a first game, but once you get a feel for the cadence of play, a two-and-a-half- to three-hour game should be achievable. I also think are area movement/area control is a good choice at a divisional scale for an Ardennes game (and for the upcoming Market Garden volume).

I imagine some people will be disappointed with this treatment of the Ardennes counter-offensive. And that’s okay; since the release of John Butterfield’s last treatment of the Bulge, Enemy Action: Ardennes, in 2015, no less than eight other Bulge games have been released, including Dean Essig’s Standard Combat System treatment, Ardennes II (Multi-Man Publishing, 2023 - two maps), The Last Blitzkrieg (Battalion Combat Series, Multi-Man Publishing, 2016 - three maps), and Bruno Sinigaglio’s A Time for Trumpets (GMT Games, 2020 with a magisterial five full-sized maps and twelve counter sheets). If you have the space and the time, there are options.

The next thing for this game will be to see how well it plays solo. The back of the box gives it a high suitability for solitaire (no hidden information), but – unusually for a John Butterfield game – the rules offer no solitaire guidance. The full game is thirteen turns, plus a German Surprise Turn at the beginning, to reflect the Americans being caught flat-footed, but there is a shorter three-turn scenario sketched out, Race to the Meuse. I’ll do a couple of play-throughs and report back. Stay tuned.

 

* Butterfield is revisiting Voyage of the BSM Pandora in a new game available for preorder from GMT called Away Team: Voyages of the Pandora (GMT Games, TBA). This will be a primarily a solitaire game (but co-op-able) of space exploration, and the early component pictures look gorgeous. Needless to say, I’ve already ordered my copy. With luck it may be out by this time next year (thought that might be a little hopeful).

** FAB designer Rick Young has been developing a new series on the bones of the old FAB system. This will be called the Battle Command system, and the first volume, containing two games, The Bulge and Operation Crusader, is also available for preorder on the GMT website.