From: "Daniel Thorpe" Subject: Re: Looking for a Review of 3W Game: 1944 Carl, I don't have 1944 on hand any more, so take what follows with a grain of salt as it is based on (now dim) memory. Anyway, I believe 1944 was Ty Bomba's last design before he left 3W / S&T to strike out on his own and start a new game magazine (wonder how that worked out?). Anyway, it covers the D-Day invasion (your choice of landing beaches) to the Rhine with one mapsheet, two counter sheets of mostly Division sized units, a 24 page or so rule book, and a couple of chart sheets, in a 2" deep bookcase box. Game had the usual 3W production problems (a tradition Decision Games has proudly maintained): substantial errata; ugly, stark white map with misprinted charts and significant terrain errors, counter misprints, etc. The game itself had some neat ideas. "Elite" units, for example, could make determined attacks that might gain you ground at the cost of burning them up. This tempted you to over commit-those units lacking heavy firepower, but high in morale (Allied paras, German Panzers & SS, etc), that the combatants historically relied on for important offensives. Neat touches were more than outweighed, as far as I was concerned, by the archetypal Ty Bomba design approach - take a simple, generic game system and try to shoehorn historical results out of it through the use of a gazillion special cases, exceptions, and add on rules. Thus, the basic game mechanics (igo-hugo with over-runs) only take a few pages of rules, but these are followed by about ten pages of "if it's Turn Ten and the Germans have done this, then activate this" sort of thing. This is the way Ty deals with events like Roer River flooding, the Battle of the Bulge, etc etc . (Why not, for example, just build a general purpose strategic reserve rule into the system that either player could use to achieve this kind of surprise? Not the Bomba way of doing things, I guess, but - as a big picture kind of guy - I find his style of rules writing very hard to assimilate). I'm pretty sure the map featured another Bombaism in that it was devoid of rail lines and roads. The latter I could accept, given the scale, but how you can simulate a strategic campaign without showing where the railroads went is beyond me. Enough of my prejudices. The general consensus at the time, IIRC, was that this was a good, but not great game marred by 3W's usual cack-handed inability on the production side. 1944 certainly didn't set any sales records as there was, at that time, a quite superb game still available that covered the same ground (West End's "Against The Reich") . To anyone interested in the campaign, I would still recommend hunting out a copy of this Balkoski classic rather than settling for 1944. Hope this helps, Daniel -----Original Message----- From: Carl Fung To: Conflict Simulations Date: 17-Jan-98 9:06 AM Subject: Looking for a Review of 3W Game > > Hi all, looking for a review of 3W's 1944: Second Front. Didn't >find a review on Web Grog's anyone own this and care to give me a little >insight on it? > >Just me talking, >Carl >