The German massed paradrop on Crete is an operation that WWII gamers have long evinced interest in, an interest only partially satiated by two old-timers: SPI’s Descent on Crete and the AH game, Air Assault on Crete. The designer of the latter - the estimable Vance von Borries - has now returned to the lovely Mediterranean island, escorted by co-designer Gene Billingsley, who provided much of the system, for another go at it, this time with a game laden with such stultifying detail that, despite its claim to be the definitive treatment of the air assault, one may be hard-pressed to figure out just who wants to undergo The Treatment. OpMerc is, as we have now come to expect from GMT, a handsome game. The maps of northwestern Crete are well-presented by the ubiquitous Mark Simonitch in rather eye-catching detail, if one can stand the visual shock of seeing large blotches of cranberry-colored mountains. The John Kranz-directed counters are marvelous - amazing what a computer can do - and the rules book is loaded with both written and pictorial examples. The game scale is small, with all the divisions and brigades broken down into their component companies, battalions and HQ’s. For example, the German 5th Mountain Division consists of 44 companies, 3 artillery battalions, and one HQ. Hexes are 1.5 km, with the areas of Crete in which the fighting took place linked by movement boxes. There is also a naval section on the map, showing Crete and its surrounding sea zones plus neighboring ports from Athens to Alexandria, all of which give OpMerc its campaign flavor. If the visual end of OpMerc is excitingly razz-ma-tazz, play is, sad to say, detail-induced tedium. This starts right off the bat with the deployment, in which all the counters are first arranged on the Set-Up and Display Cards - GMT sure doesn’t stint in the Card area - and then placed in their proper hexes, movement boxes and sea zones. The actual game system proves to be a roiling sea, ponderously detailed with mini-rules through which the gamers must sail with great, and time-consuming, caution. That they are blessed with rules that provide good directions to help them avoid the Shoals of Contradiction and the Doldrums of Obscurity is most helpful. [Ed. One only wishes those same rules contained instructions on deep-sixing the Monster of the Metaphor.] Still, the Scourge of half-forgotten Passages invariable holds up the show. There is so much detail that page-flipping intermissions occur with the regularity of sponsor-induced time-outs for a TV Football game, and the Sequence of Play is jaw-dropping, although, if you ignore the naval game, you can forget one-third of it. After the potpourri of Commonwealth types - and a colorful lot of Aussies, Brits, New Zealanders and Greeks they are - have been distributed around the island, the first wave of Germans drop in: 56 companies of paratroopers and glider-borne infantry raining from the sky into mobs of somewhat nonplused allies … mostly concentrated in the Maleme area … all in broad daylight. For each of these fellas the German player has to check first for landing condition and then Dispersal, with many of the Germans drifting right out to sea. (It appears that many of the target drop zones were located right on the coast, for some bizarre reason.) After all the landing/drift dierolls have been made, those paratroopers who managed to land right in Allied-occupied hexes (not a rare feat here) get to make a special airborne assault attack in an effort to clear out the defenders. This seldom works because the attacking Teutonic Types are scattered and dispersed, while the combat mechanics are a Defender’s dream. By the end of this phase, the German player is usually trying to find a good place to hide and regroup. (One assumes that the moronic Nazi bastard [Ed. Redundant, Scott … very redundant.] who thought up this idiotic plan got his kiester demoted to a Russian mailroom.) You’d think that the Allies would then just roll in and mop up what’s left. But no, an equally short-sighted and dim-bulbed Commonwealth Command won’t release its forces for fear that all these Men from the Sky were just decoys to lure the defenders off the coast, where the REAL invasion was going to come. It is at this point that the full OpMerc system swings into effect, offering a wealth of detail and special rules for the many important decisions players must attempt to make in an attempt to reduce the horrendous screw-ups to a minimum. And screwing up is the heart of the OpMerc system. The game is engineered so that almost nothing goes right for the players. When both sides do manage to re-organize, they find that attacks are still hard to execute. This is because the combat system puts a premium on attack coordination, something almost impossible to achieve without HQ’s … and there are far too few of those to go around. Without HQ’s, most units are reduced to dangerous dierolls, a failure at which produces some gruesome frontal assaults on a CRT that favors the defense (mostly because of the terrain). There are two types of land combat in the game: Maneuver Combat, which allows the attacker to (hopefully) use his offensive fire support; and Assault Combat, which takes place after maneuver Combat, by units which didn’t engage in such. Assault is a bloody undertaking in which the attacker has to first survive the defender dieroll. Now, why, you may ask, would anyone undertake something so suicidal, especially when the CRT so favors the defender? Well, the kicker is that the attacker may roll against his Efficiency Rating to continue the attack, as must then the Defender, and if the attacker is more “efficient”, his chances of inflicting step loss harm are good. As the game slowly (very slowly) progresses, both sides tend to bleed themselves dry, and the units remaining on the map start to form mobile stacks of bruisers who then play “Smash the Weakling”. At the end of Game-turn 14, if the Allies have lost 30+ steps - Greeks not included - evacuation just might occur. If so, the allied Player has ten turns to bug out (again, Greeks can go to Hell, for some reason), by retreating to Allied-held ports. This is a daunting task, because it is impossible to get rid of the German air units for any length of time, and, when present, they’re going to bomb those Limey boats into oblivion. (The game does not come with a Guns of Navarone counter.) Looking at the individual systems and mechanics within OpMerc, one finds much good, much too admire, much that is creative. But, in combination, those three “Goods” add up to one Slug. They act as an albatross around the player’s neck, slowing play to a crawl. A lot of effort was put into simulating an operation/battle in which few things went right. So much so, that you end up with a game that is historically accurate but ponderous and, ultimately, discouraging. One notes that the game boxcover is copyrighted 1992, while the rules are from 1994. Too bad all that time wasn’t spent streamlining play. CAPSULE COMMENTS: Graphic Presentation: Beautiful. Playability: Ponderously slow, and somewhat confusing. The box insists Solo Play is “Very High”. Maybe that refers to what you have to be to get through it alones. Replayability: Lots of scenarios help boost this area. Wristage: Carton of Ben-Gay to go. Creativity: The game’s strong point. Historicity: One assumes pretty good; why else would Vance list 51 tomes in his annotated bibliography? Comparisons: Far more detailed - and probably more interesting, if not as playable - as Air Assault on- and Descent on Crete. Overall: Players looking for a game with lots of detail and creative mechanics - and a hard-to-win victory - will be satisfied. For the rest of us, too much lard in this pie. from GMT GAMES 2 22” x 34” maps, 480 counters, Rules Book, 8 Player Cards. Boxed. GMT , POB 1308, Hanford CA 93232. $32. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. II # 15 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com