Greetings, Here is a review of GMT's "World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin," for the Grognards page. Feel free to use it. Thanks, R. Ben Madison ******** Review of “World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin” (GMT Games) I almost feel dirty criticizing a Ted Raicer design. His pioneering point-to-point strategic game on World War I, “Paths of Glory,” is based on the card-driven system used many years ago in Avalon Hill’s “We the People” (on the American Revolution) and “For the People” (on the American Civil War, more recently updated and published by GMT). “World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin” (hereafter: WW2BTB) is the application of the same game system to World War II. Physically, the game is incredibly attractive. The map is very detailed, dividing central and eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, into dozens of “spaces” (boxes connected by movement lines). The map is extremely well-done, functional, and a beautiful piece of artwork. Once again with graphics, GMT is leading the pack (second, perhaps, to Avalanche Press). Counters are similar to “Paths of Glory,” with smaller units, generally corps, represented by standard size counters, while larger units, generally armies, are represented by larger counters. Stacks composed entirely of small units fight on a different CRT. “Strategy Cards” drive the game. Each card can be played either as an event, or to bring in reinforcements, or to “activate” units to either move or fight (but not both). A card may also be played to move units by strategic redeployment. Some events are “combat cards,” so they can be played as events while simultaneously enabling units to fight; the event affects the combat in some way. The cards are beautiful, full of interesting illustrations (the picture of Hitler screaming his declaration of war on America is hilarious) and are generally easy to read. (One glitch: Axis phases are marked as red with counters on a map display, but Axis events are marked in blue on the cards. Allied phases are marked in blue on the counters, but in red on the cards. This is a small problem but can occasionally lead to confusion as to whose turn it is.) I collect strategic World War II games, and I am happy to own this one. Only from what I can tell, it doesn’t really work. When we set the game up for a run-through a month ago, we were confronted with a number of problems. The first thing about the game is that it is what it says: “World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin.” The game begins in June of 1941. The first two years of World War II are gone; there is no Polish campaign, no Scandinavia, no Battle of France, no Balkan war. These are, in some ways, the most interesting parts of World War II for many people, but Raicer’s design tries to treat the war as a purely military affair by removing the part of the war in which the alliances themselves came together, and in which the decisions were political as well as military. As a result, WW2BTB can squeeze the entire war into 15 pages of rules. Our play of the game revealed a number of bizarre features. One strange feature is the use of the Strategy Cards for movement/combat or reinforcements, but not both. This creates a dynamic where huge piles of reinforcements build up behind the lines but can’t be sent to the front, or where combat at the front is unending and holes cannot be plugged because new units can’t be created. But the worst feature of the Strategy Cards is that so many of them are not dependent on conditions or board position or really anything else. To give one example: In our game, the war was raging furiously in North Africa. The British had pushed Rommel and the Italians back to El Agheila, but were stalemated; the Allies had not yet drawn the card allowing them to open a second front with Operation Torch (historically, the 1942 invasion of Morocco and Algeria). But... our Allied player did draw the Operation Husky card. Now in real life, Operation Husky was the invasion of Sicily. It was launched from bases in next-door Tunisia, well after Rommel had been defeated. But according to WW2BTB, there are no conditions for the play of “Operation Husky.” So our Allied player simply went along and invaded Sicily, from some unknown, mysterious base (Shangri-La?). This rendered the war in North Africa completely irrelevant. There is no reason to push the Axis out of Libya, no reason to invade Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia at all. You don’t need those areas to invade Italy; you can just invade Italy from outer space. **** Correction: The above assertion that you may launch Husky while the Axis are unbeaten in North Africa ("rendering North Africa irrelevant") is incorrect, since invading in the Med outside North Africa can only be done once the Axis are cleared from North Africa. **** The “Husky” card reveals another weird feature of this game. Invasion cards like Husky and Overlord do not transport existing army units onto beach-heads. Instead, they create new units at the moment of invasion. What this means, is that the US Seventh Army is not raised in America, shipped to Europe, and then used where the player wants it used. Instead, you need to invade Sicily to create the Seventh Army at all. If you choose not to invade Sicily, the Seventh Army is not going to be created. The whole game is full of these niggling little points; you don’t launch Operation Torch to establish strategic position or control territory, you launch Operation Torch to create armies you can use somewhere else. The lack of rules and the overriding Strategy Cards sometimes conspire to generate other weird results. For example, there are no surrender rules. In our game, the Soviets launched a counterattack into Romania right after Germany launched Operation Barbarossa. The counterattack was so successful, that Bucharest, Romania’s capital, was under Soviet occupation for two years (!) along with most of the rest of Romania. However, this did not force Romania to surrender. Only a late-war event card can do that. Ironically, the Germans finally pushed the Russians out of Bucharest in the fall of 1943, and the very next turn, the Allies drew the “Romania surrenders” card, and Romania collapsed. (As an aside, in real life the Romanian army switched sides and by 1945, allied Romanian forces were the fourth largest Allied force in Europe after the Russians, Americans, and British. In this game, the Romanian army just disappears and is never seen again.) Strategies are somewhat different in WW2BTB than in “Paths of Glory,” since here you have tank units with greater mobility. Our experience with the game is that tanks are a mixed blessing, since they can create big breakthroughs, but are often countered by counter-breakthroughs. It was very common in our play of the game, to have a big breakthrough cut off and pocketed by the other side, and then we would launch another attack to “relieve” the pocket, and so we’d trade breakthroughs and pockets. Not that pockets are that important; a pocketed, surrounded Army can survive on its accumulated rations for nine months! (Tell that to the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.) Other odd features can be mentioned in passing. The game discounts additional possibilities in Western Europe; Spain is not represented on the map (no possibility of a front there to take Gibraltar and choke off the Med). Finland isn’t even on the map, but Sweden is, and if Germany wants to, it can invade Sweden--though doing so seems rather pointless. Turkey and the Middle East are on the map, and can be invaded, but the Germans were so woefully short on units in our game (the Allies drove from Sicily to Munich in short order with the Germans pinned down on the Eastern Front), our Axis player never, ever considered spreading himself even thinner by invading Turkey. Ted Raicer’s World War I game, “Paths of Glory,” is a fun game, although it works only if you play it as a strict historical simulation (and don’t pervert the rules by doing anything idiotically ahistorical), or as a strict game, where you throw caution and history to the wind. WW2BTB, I don’t think, works well as a game or as a historical simulation. The accumulated unrealities are too distracting. Which is a shame, since this was obviously a major project from a brilliant designer. -- Join a nation small enough for your voice to be heard... And big enough for your voice to make a real difference! Join the Kingdom of Talossa! http://www.execpc.com/~talossa