Requesting an Honest review

I can only say thats its nothing like d-day… its something very new. Its very concerned with logistics in combat and more standard wargame combat using ZOC.

35 bucks will not set you back because the game plays very intense for 2 hours. excellent 2 player game. more so than any other in the line of games.

IL is right. BOTB is nothing like D-Day. It is much more fluid. The random casualties aspect makes it unlike any other A&A game. The supply aspect (you must have use supply tokens to move and fight) makes where you are going not as important as will I have gas and bullets when I get there?
You have to know where you will want to attack and move next turn and bring in and locate the appropriate supplies.

The map is divided by hexes and you must capture a number of them to win as Germany or hold the Germans off for a set number of turns 8 as the Allies.

It is nothing like Revised but (okay a little like D-Day) in that you have re-inforcement charts. But what comes in each turn is not random. These are turn one reinforcements not roll two dice and take the next x units.

I don’t think you will consider this unbiased but I do think they are accurate and informative. There are 8 total.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/article/ah20061004a

I think it is a terrific game.

Here are two reviews from the Parkersburg News. The first is from Michael Erb, our usual game reviewer, the second is mine, which ran with his. He is the game guru, me, I just came into it with a life-long interest in WWII.

Dave

Axis & Allies’ a fun, accessible war game

By MICHAEL ERB
Staff Writer
The Parkersburg News and Sentinel
www.newsandsentinel.com

PARKERSBURG — To begin with, I am not what you would call a history buff. What I know about World War II is a combination of a few high school and college classes, a Discovery Channel documentary and a couple of movies seen on the big screen.

My experience with wargames likewise has been limited over the years to a few games that feature skirmish-level combat: A half-dozen figures battle it out on a game board, usually with a lot of random dice rolls determining who wins and who loses.

Most actual ‘‘wargames’’ or ‘‘historical games’’ involve too many rules and too many expensive miniatures and terrain elements to attract a casual gamer like myself. Besides, who has the time and space to devote to a game that could potentially last days while taking up half of your garage?

‘‘Axis & Allies: Battle of the Bulge’’ does two things and it does them well: It accurately represents a historical battle while providing a fun, engaging game that is easy enough for the average player to learn and enjoy in an evening.

Battle of the Bulge is one of the latest in the Avalon Hill series of Axis & Allies wargames, but it is a bit different in rules and presentation from the other games. The original Axis & Allies represented World War II as a whole, with a world-spanning map and much larger and all-encompassing battles. A single round could see entire countries fall to invading armies. Battle of the Bulge, however, plays out a series of battles in a single military operation: The fight for control of The Ardennes.

Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of Avalon Hill, was kind enough to provide a review copy of the two-player game, and from the board to the bits to the gameplay, I was impressed.

In Battle of the Bulge, units are represented by plastic figures according to their type: infantry, tanks, trucks, artillery and air support. Each unit provides the player with a number of 12-sided dice while attacking, and each can take a certain number of hits before being destroyed and removed from the game. Any role of 6 or less is considered a hit, and a single hit means a unit must retreat. Two hits and a unit is destroyed. If a unit hit once cannot retreat, it is destroyed.

The objectives of the game are simple: The Axis forces must capture more than 23 victory points worth of cities, which means the player would actually do better than the Germans did historically. The Allied player must hold the line and prevent the Axis player from gaining that many victory points for at least eight rounds, when ‘‘superior air forces’’ would turn the tide of the war against the Axis.

The key to the game is resource management. Stocks of fuel and ammunition are limited, and the Allies will have greater resources than the Axis, as was historically true. Supplies are represented by tokens which travel with your forces, but cannot move on their own. Without supply tokens, your units can’t move or fight, and supplies can be commandeered by enemy forces if you leave them unguarded. Often it comes down to a question of tactics: Do you destroy an enemy’s supplies to cripple them, or do you risk a counter-attack by trying to destroy their forces directly while preserving those tokens in the hopes of taking them yourself?

The game is wonderfully balanced while keeping its historical perspective. The Axis is the only force that can attack during the first round, simulating the German offensive which caught the Allied forces off guard. The Allies, however, have more resources and reinforcements to call upon, so even startling losses during the first round can be compensated for and keep the Allied player in the game. During one game that was cut short, my Allied forces were decimated within the first round, but a increasing stream of reinforcements slowly allowed me to build back up my troops and hold some key cities while the Axis forces found themselves stretched too thin and low on supplies. Had the game gone on for just a few more rounds, I am confident I could have held the line, or at least made the player pay dearly for his victories.

The map and pieces are beautiful, and the rulebook is easy to follow and in several areas explains why certain decisions were made in gameplay to keep things historically accurate. The friend and co-worker whom I got to play with is a fan of World War II history, and he was eager to see how accurate it could be. Ultimately he came away ranting about how fun it was to play. Though Christmas has come and gone, I may very well be giving him his own copy of this game as a present in the near future.

I am not a wargamer, and probably never will be. But I definitely will be playing Battle of the Bulge several more times, and my experience has made me want to check out other ‘‘lite’’ wargames to see how they play.

For more information on Axis & Allies: Battle of the Bulge and other Avalon Hill games, go to www.avalonhill.com.

Contact Michael Erb at merb101@newsandsentinel.com.

‘Axis & Allies’ passes test for historical accuracy

By DAVE PAYNE Sr.
Staff Writer
The Parkersburg News and Sentinel
www.newsandsentinel.com

PARKERSBURG — “Where’s Antwerp?’’

That was my initial reaction when I first saw the game board for ’’Axis & Allies: Battle of the Bulge’’ from Avalon Hill.

The Belgian city was a crucial Allied seaport and the main goal of the December 1944 German offensive was to capture it. It wasn’t on the game board. At first, I thought that was an incredible oversight. After all, if the Germans can’t capture Antwerp, what is the point of the offensive?

It didn’t take me long to realize that omission was a stroke of genius. Besides the fact that Antwerp is so far away from the Bulge it would be difficult to put it on a game-board map, it wasn’t an attainable goal for the Germans during the war.

The game operates on the assumption that the Germans were doomed from the beginning. As terrible as that battle was for both sides, its result was inevitable. I’m glad the designers realized that.

The object of the game is for the Axis player to simply do better than the Wehrmacht did in the Ardennes offensive, which the Germans called “Wacht Am Rein (Watch on the Rhine).’’ That’s a much more realistic goal than the one Hitler had.

Playing the game should help players develop a better understanding of what happened and the game’s accompanying book does a good job of explaining the historical context in each move.

I’ve never played a war game before, but I am a World War II enthusiast and have visited the Ardennes and the U.S. cemetery in Luxemburg where our soldiers killed in the Bulge were buried.

Fueled by enthusiasm, I found it easy to learn in the brief game I played (as the Axis player) with game reviewer Michael Erb. Only a third of the way into what comprises a finished game (we had to end it early) I had done much better than the real Germans had in the same timeframe.

While nearly everyone has heard of the remarkable efforts of the U.S. 101st Airborne to occupy Bastogne before the Germans got there and to defend the town from relentless attacks, many aren’t aware of how crucial that was to the war effort. One glance at the game board will show that to get anywhere, you need to go through Bastogne.

I captured Bastogne from Michael in turn No. 2.

The real-life Bulge offensive was designed to be a one-two punch with two attacks. First the Bulge, then an attack through the Alsace-Lorraine region in southern France, from which the Allies would have (and did) removed troops to reinforce the Bulge.

Punch No. 2 was Germany’s true last World War II offensive, Operation Nordwind (German for ’’north wind’’). It was a major effort and far more successful than the Bulge attack. Nordwind lasted from New Year’s Day 1945 (Hitler usually attacked and invaded on the first of the month) until the end of January.

With that in mind, I would like to offer an additional scenario of game play — no Nordwind.

In Nordwind, the Germans used eight divisions, three of which were elite S.S. My suggestion is to make the Nordwind units available to the Axis player in a true ’’Hitler’s last gamble’’ scenario.

To make the game fair to the Allies, increase the number of victory points the Axis needs to win or simply continue to fight it out after the game would normally end. Another option would be to have the German Nordwind and Allied reinforcements arrive around the same time from the south (as many of the Allied reinforcements came from the Nordwind sector) and see how long the Axis player can stave off the bitter end, which, regardless of how the game is played, is inevitable.

Thanks for sharing those reviews. Do the two of you ever go up the Ohio River to Wheeling? Or is there another Parkersburg somewhere in the US? There is a “mini-con” coming up on the Jan. 27th. 4 people would make a nice little round robin.

How are the Allies doing win wise in your games?

We’ve only played one. I’ve been to Wheeling a few times. The newspaper that owns ours, in fact, is the Wheeling Intellegencer.

Well let me know if you need some more info if you want to come up. There is one other guy that I usually play one varitation of A&A with. We’ll probably play BOTB as it will be his first chance to play it. If you are up for an all day thing we should be able to get three games in.

The invite is of course open to any other intrested players.