Two maps, 720 counters, 1 rules pamphlet. XTR, San Luis Obispo, CA. It's hard to keep count of how many Bulge games there are out there. The Bulge is a subject, like Gettysburg or Stalingrad that, like it nor not, just keeps reincarnating itself. Whether out of a desire to "get it right" or just to examine the battle from a different aspect, some designer is always ready to take a crack at battles that, because of their inherent high drama, remain popular. In the case of the Bulge, you are seeing cornered and exhausted Germany lashing out with what's left of its precious strategic reserves in a desperate attempt to win the war in the West. This is neither the German Army that humbled the Allies in this same area in 1940 nor the unstoppable steel beast that rolled into Russia in 1941. The infantry divisions are largely undergunned and manned by poorly-trained conscripts, while the Panzer forces are full strength and include a cast of many divisions famous from other campaigns. Aside from the above, the situation itself is interesting in that you have a surprise attack on an unprepared enemy (always fun) who recovers to deliver a crushing counterattack. Into this time-honored mix we insert one of the hobby's rising stars, John Desch, whose earlier works (Ring of Fire, Tank Commander, et al.) are rapidly making him wargaming's answer to John Cameron: whatever subject John takes on is accompanied by lots of explosions, pyrotechnics, excitement, energy, and fun. His design for the Bulge, Wave of Terror, is no exception. He has taken a battle that I myself never found anything more than stereotyped and predictable and turned it into a real nail-biter. Wave of Terror covers the '44 Ardennes battle at 1.5 miles to the hex, from Echternach in the south to Monschau and Eupen in the north, thus providing a larger battlefield and obviously, more possible strategies, than one usually finds in cardboardland. The game turns are daily and the units are all two-step battalions. For all the game's simplicity, the battalion level keeps the game interesting simply because the greater number of steps within each division (a division being 9 or more 2-step battalions, hence 18 steps before it folds) makes it more difficult (and longer) to eliminate. The game will not be won or lost on a few die rolls because a key formation gets eliminated in two or three combats. Whatever beating a formation takes, it usually has enough strength left to keep fighting. On the other hand, the CRT is highly attritional, and the attacker almost always takes a loss, unless the odds are very high, so care has to be used to avoid squandering your forces. Constant combat and gratuitous attacks can quickly whittle away formations. Even so, most divisions can still muster at least a small battlegroup of some sort by the end of the game. Much like The Gamers' Ardennes, this is a basic (but not 3-1, "classic"), scrubbed-down design with few bells and whistles. John has kept extra rules to enough of a minimum to allow players to concentrate on strategy. Normally, designs of this sort don't hold much interest for me, as they offer little to think about. Wave is an exception in that, as simple as it is, it keeps your attention and offers a lot of problems to resolve. Among the several reasons it works so well is a map that does a better job than any other Bulge game I've seen of reflecting the broken Ardennes terrain. The number of river crossings, blocked hexsides, and crossroads, plus the high cost of moving off road, accurately portray the difficulty of moving large armored forces quickly through rough terrain during bad weather. The action gets channeled down certain roads and valleys and through key villages as it did historically. At the same time, the hex scale and large number of units allow players some chance of flanking a blocking position. Stacking is enforced throughout the game turn to create traffic jams and force you to assign your armored spearheads their own roads. Another virtue of the map is that the area of operations extends much further north of Monschau than other Bulge games. I've found that if 6th SS Panzer Army gets bogged down around Malmedy or Trois Ponts (not at all unlikely), later reinforcements can develop a new attack north of Monschau to move through Eupen and Verviers and threaten Liege and the Allied fuel dumps near Spa. The map is also the most attractive XTR, and Beth Queman, have yet produced. While Wave is your basic Igo-Hugo affair, John has subdivided the turns into "couplets" that let the player decide whether he will attack first and move second, or vice-versa. The attack-first couplet gives the player a favorable column shift on the CRT. Given the right preparation for such an attack, you can blow away an enemy position and then move through it. Conversely, you can move first, then attack and in your next couplet, select an attack-first scheme and therefore get off two attacks against a tough position. Nothing complicated in this arrangement, but you do have to think about how to sequence your operations. The most "controversial" aspect of Wave is its lack of ZOC's, a subject over which many designers and reviewers have developed some rather sore mental bunions. I think the lack of ZOC works just fine. Given the physical reality (ground fog, extreme cold, unprepared American troops, broken up terrain), a no-ZOC mechanic is reasonable. A small blocking force in a gorge is going to have a hard time hindering or even knowing about a force bypassing them on the other side of a high, tree-lined ridge in the dead of winter. The American can't defend everywhere, and they don't even have to, as it is enough to cork the bottle at a bridge or along a road running between two blocked hexsides. The lack of ZOC makes you think more about using your units effectively rather than just stringing up a ZOC fence across the map. To confound the combat-factor bean counters, John has a rule that limits attacks to the units of a single division, along with two independent (unassigned) units and artillery. This very reasonably prevents players from reshuffling the strongest units from each division to create super-divisions that unrealistically cross all command boundaries, an elegant and effective way to make you operate your divisions as unified commands. Paradoxically, though, it creates a problem. The single-division attack rule also reduces the armies to collections of single divisions operating without reference to each other. The inability to hit a hex with units from more than one division eliminates any sort of corps or army command structure. For example, if you had Bastogne surrounded by three divisions, you could attack it with just one division per combat phase. You are thereby forced to make uncoordinated, piecemeal attacks. In reality, these divisions were all being run by corps commanders who would have coordinated their formations to operate together. As things stand in Wave, you can't do that. Wave's other shortcoming, at least in my eyes, is a total lack of any rules for Grief teams. Others might complain that von der Heydte's paratroopers were left out, too, but, after all, they did spend the campaign hiding in barns and ditches. On the other hand, those good ole gum-chewing ersatz-Amis did cause a great deal of confusion during the actual battle, and it would have been quite easy to include a simple rule to reflect their actions. XTR has considerably improved their product since the old one-size-fits-all Krim days, and Wave should end up, like Proud Monster and Great War in Europe, as one of Command's classics. Wave offers players more decisions, more action, and more fun than most any other Bulge game I've played. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphics: Great looking game. Playability: Very accessible, but requires thought and planning. Solitaire good. Replayability: Highly-incremental combat losses, a larger map area and a variable turn sequence make each game different from the last … within the parameters of the situation. Creativity: Simplicity as a Muse. Historicity: This is not a dissertation on the Bulge. Acceptable, but not definitive. Wristage: You fight lots of battles? You roll lots of dice. Comparisons: Has the scale of Wacht am Rhein, but closer to Gamer's Ardennes, or the SPI Battles/Ardennes in complexity. Wave's high pace of action and strategic options make it a nice amalgamation of the three. (Andsee the following review!) Overall: One of the better Bulge games - and there are plenty - available. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #25 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com