Dear Consimmers, From time to time, it's fun to play and discuss a really old wargame. The specimen we have today is the old Conflict Game title, "Overlord", their Normandy campaign game. Let's settle in for a good discussion. Some background on the game and company: Actually, I don't really know all that much. Conflict Games was apparently John Hill's company in the late 1960s-early 1970s time frame. I have another Conflict Game (Kasserine Pass--this one came in a ziploc bag), and I know they also made a Verdun game on their own. But I have never seen a Conflict Games catalog, or a listing of all the games that might have been produced by them. At some point, perhaps in the mid to late 1970s, Conflict Games apparently worked out some kind of a cooperative deal with GDW. A second edition of Verdun was produced (And I own a copy of this game). The 2nd edition Verdun game got the full treatment from GDW: a mounted map and a large box with ubiquitous Roger MacGowan artwork. In any case Overlord is copyrighted 1973--long before John Hill went on to wargame immortality with his Squad Leader design. As such, Overlord represents a chance to see the design work of one of hex'n'counter wargaming's major figures before he was a star. And it's also a chance to look at what was probably a "typical" wargame, if that term applies, from the time period before the "golden age" of wargaming had begun in earnest. The physical components: The game comes in a 11 1/2" X 8 3/8" X 1 1/8 " box. The box cover is a somewhat cartoony depiction of a paratrooper of the 101st. Inside are the 19 5/8" X 22 3/4" map, two reinforcement schedules, a CRT on cardstock, the mammoth 4 page rule book (3 pages really, the cover takes up one page), a page of errata and clarifications and the 304 5/8" counters. There are 153 one sided Allied counters shown in a kind of buff color, and 119 one sided German counters shown in a light to medium gray. All these are ground units, and they are shown with the standard NATO symbols. Each counter has a combat strength and a movement allowance. The counters are shown at the regiment or brigade level, but the regimental or brigade historical designation does not appear for the most part on the counters, only the divisional designation. There are also 32 blank counters (31 in the German color, 1 in the Allied color) showing only the "box" of the NATO symbol, so I guess you can replace some lost units, or add some more if you'd like. The map shows the Normandy terrain using five colors (this was more than SPI did in the early 70s). There wasn't really any ambiguous terrain. In that sense, the map is clear and functional. In terms of subjective attractiveness; the overall effect is ok, but kind of "heavy". The roads are these big thick red lines, and the rivers are very heavily drawn blue lines. The bocage hexes are shown using that standard "forest" pattern that was commonly used by SPI also during this time period. The hex scale is not listed; I calculated it to be 5 kilometers/hex. The system: The system is simplicity itself. Here's the sequence of play: German Movement, German Combat, Allied Movement, Allied Combat. We've all gotten so used to the complex sequences of play, with their multiple impulses and subphases, that a simple move and fight sequence seems toylike in comparison. But it's also liberating; as a player, you're not really fighting the system or fighting to learn the system, or fighting to figure out how to maximize the system. You're just moving your guys and fighting battles. It's fun. ZOCs are rigid basically, but combat is not mandatory. If you want to fight, you can. The Allies have some abstract air points, and naval gunfire points close to the beacheads, they can add in to attacks. And the naval gunfire can be used to help defensively. Unused offensive air points can be used to interdict the road net, making the Germans pay more to go through those hexes on the next German player turn (that's a clever touch). The CRT is an odds-based 6-value table--There are no DRMs! Isn't that something! The rules: The rules are written in a nonlegalese "conversational" style. They are clear enough, as far as they go. The problem is that issues come up that are simply not addressed anywhere, and the player is left to his own devices. Here's an example: The CRT features mostly "whole hex" results, with the attacker or the defender retreating hexes, or the attacker or defender being completely eliminated, and so on. When the defender retreats, the attacker is usually permitted to advance one less hex than the defender retreated. So in a "D back 3" result, the attacker may advance up to two hexes. That's clear enough. However, there is a provision for a "breakthrough" movement when the CRT result is "Defender eliminated". In that case, the attacker rolls a single D6 and gets to advance that many *movement points*, with the provision that the first hex entered must be the one that the D elim units occupied. Here's the problem: There are lots of situations in which simply moving into the vacated hex might require more movement points than you would get on the die roll! For example, if you were attacking across a river (+2 MPs) and into bocage (2 MPs) it would take you a die roll of 4 or better just to get any victorious units into the vacated hex. From an advance standpoint, you would have been better off rolling weaker on the attack and settling for a D back 3, which would have guaranteed that at least you could occupy the vacated hex. You could argue that "standard wargame practice" dictates that you can always occupy the vacated hex. But it doesn't say that in the rules, and how you interpret the rule as stated could potentially make a *big* difference in how the game plays. If the example I gave were the only problem like this, it would be a quibble. But this problem happened over and over again in the game as I played it. The rules are simply too terse to cover all the specific outcomes. In solitaire mode, I just made a mental house rule for each situation as it came up, but if played with your garden variety rules laywer, you could be arguing all night long. The problem with the lack of detail in the rules should not blind us though to some really clever rules whose implications seem quite subtle. My favorite rule is called "Selective Attack". Basically, if you attack a hex, you have to attack all the units in the hex, but you can choose to attack the different defending units sequentially with different sets of attacking units. If you can bring enough attackers to bear, you can overload on one counter in the stack, and given the bloodiness of the CRT, probably kill it. You then may be to survive with the remaining attackers getting only a bump back instead of an AE--John Hill refers to this process as "soaking off". As we discussed earlier on this list, this use of the term is not exactly consistent with the Avalon Hill model, or the SPI model (who, as far as we could determine, never actually used the expression "soak off" in their rules). Regardless of what you call it, figuring if, or when, to use this approach was a nontrivial problem for me, and trying to solve that problem helped hold my interest in the game. Some comments on how I played this game: I'll have some comments about balance, game play and so on, but for you to evaluate them, let me tell you about how I played this game. First, I always follow The Gamers prescriptions regarding rounding and stack inspection (round to the closest combat value, not necessarily down, and you can't inspect the other player's stacked units). Second, I almost always play wargames solitaire, and I did so on this one. Finally, I played with the German counters only inverted. Creating a deliberate intelligence asymmetry like this seemed reasonable given what I knew, or thought I knew, about the situation the Allies faced in the summer of 1944 in France. Even as simple as the game is, I goofed up a couple of rules. For example, I forgot to shift to the July-August CRT until pretty late in July (I kept using the June CRT). The July-August CRT is even bloodier than the June CRT and probably favors the Allies, who can afford the attrition. "Siting" the game within the context of other Normandy games: In wargaming, we tend to evaluate each game as a thing that stands on its own. I can understand the reasons for this; it seems unfair to say "Game X is terrible compared to Game Y on the same subject". However, I'm going to try to argue that some of the strengths of Overlord really don't emerge until it is compared to the wargaming "literature" of other Normandy games. There are a couple of points here: First, all of the games that I'll use as a basis for comparison are interesting and offer the wargamer some valuable insights and good gaming fun. Second, I don't really have anything like a complete listing of all Normandy games, so this will be an illustrative, not an exhaustive comparison, and third, I'm making a distinction between Normandy games and D-Day games. The former games make either an explicit or implicit assumption that the invasion was going to basically "work"; the question is how long would take the Allies to break out of the beachead. So you start with your historical guys on the beach, unlike a D-Day game. I'd like to compare Overlord to a few other games that I own; I've placed them in a kind of canonical form: Game Pub. Unit scale Hex scale Time scale Omaha beach to St. Lo (hexes) Cobra (SPI) regt/div 3.2 kilom. 3 days/turn 10 hexes* Overlord (Conflict) regt/brig. 5 kilom. 3 days/turn 7 hexes Norm.Camp.(GDW) div. 10 kilom 3 days/turn 4 hexes Dec.in Fr.(Rhino) div. 12 kilom. 3 days/turn 3 hexes *Cobra doesn't actually show the beachead hexes--I estimated how far it would be based on the map. There are some similarities and differences among the games. You can see a pattern with the 3 days/turn. In most of the games, Overlord for sure, there is one long scenario dealing with the Summer of 1944. Overlord and Normandy Campaign cover the period beginning with June 6, and you play through the rest of June, July, August. Decision in France begins with June 25, but at that map scale, the Allies have hardly advanced out of their beachead by then. It goes until Sept. 2 (24 turns). Cobra focuses on the fight through the bocage and the pocketing of German troops at Falaise; it begins on June 16 and goes to August 23 (13 turns). Overlord begins with the June 6 turn, and ends with the August 28 turn (28 turns) The double-blind Normandy game from GDW (a cool little game in its own right) begins with June 7 and goes until August 20th. (25 turns). One of the things that's important to realize is what a tremendous slogging match the Normandy campaign was. For example, according to my WWII atlas, the Allies did not take the inland city of St. Lo until midnight of July 24 (fully 16 turns of the 28 turn Overlord game). In other words, on a historical basis, except for Cobra, most of the time in game turns is spent battling over a relatively small portion of the map (a tiny portion of the Decision in France map--where you start the game a little later, but still...). The number of game turns that you spend fighting hex by hex really affects the illusion of movement in the game. One of the problems that the bigger hex scale games have is that in the campaign game you spend a lot of turns fighting and refighting over each individual hex, and not seeming to get anywhere. I'm sure the Allies felt that way too in the Summer of 1944. Overlord still gives you the slogging match (16-17 turns to go 7 hexes), but with a better hex and unit granularity so you can actually see some of the operational problems more clearly than you might in the two bigger hex scale games. And for me, that detail in granularity really created the fun. I really liked being able to take the regts of a German division and put them each in a different hex, and cover a bigger front. Or, instead, take the elements of a big Panzer division, stack 'em up and show the Allies that the war wasn't over yet. Cobra probably gives you even more detail, but it doesn't show the beachead hexes, doesn't cover the build-up phase of the Normandy campaign, and doesn't show the Cotentin peninsula. Playing Overlord: As my comments above imply, I'm not really a WWII gamer, and so I had somewhat naively thought that the Allies were able to overwhelm the Germans rather quickly in terms of both numbers and materiel. I was therefore suprised to find out that the Allies weren't dictating the tempo of the game from the earliest turns. In fact, it was just the opposite, the Germans were pushing the Allies around, especially the British/Canadian forces who seemed to bear the brunt of the attacks by the German armored divisions, including the SS divisions, who are really tough in Overlord. The CRT is very bloody as well and this creates a big dead pile for both sides. Mechanically or theoretically, the game is very primitive too. It has that "retreat through a ZOC and you're dead" problem. One issue with this is that it is very hard to bring enough numbers to bear on a German stack to advance on anything like a broad front. So if you succeed in clearing a hex, you can advance (most of the time), but you're almost sure to be sticking your head into a hole, and the Germans will be happy to chop it off in their half of the turn, which they can do, advance into the hole in the line that you left, and restore the continuity of their line. But to give you some idea of what an expensive proposition this, I've reproduced the losses in units for the Germans and Allies after the Aug. 18th turn (25 turns through a 28 turn campaign scenario): Nation Armor/Mech units lost Inf. units lost German 30 59 Brit/Can/French 18 27 US 8 13 Following this turn, the Allies (but not the Germans) get a certain number of replacements on each turn, so the final totals might be a little less for the Allies. As you can see, the Germans had in the dead pile 89 of their 119 combat units (about 75%). So the Germans were bled white, but they were still holding the Allies near Avranches in the south. The game turned out to be a German victory; the Allies had exited only 3 2/3 divisions by the end of the game (they needed to exit 9), but the Germans could hardly have held on for even one more turn as they had only 8 units on the board by the end of the game! As far as balance is concerned, the game went down to the wire. I think this added to the enjoyment of the game. Generally speaking, I'll be bored with a game long before 28 turns have elapsed. The fact that I wanted to see how this game turned out is itself a statement about the game's play value. Overall, Overlord was an interesting gaming experience, and an interesting look back for me to an earlier age in wargaming. Thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@advancenet.com