5 maps, 1540 counters, OCS series rules, DAK game and scenario rules and charts, OCS charts, boxed with counter trays, The Gamers, $119. The Gamers have always had a double-edged emphasis on their productions: Bigger is Better, and Series Repetitions make for Clarity and Accessibility. Normally, size and complexity are the natural fathers of error. This is where Dean's focus on series games comes to the rescue. Essentially, The Gamers publish all new games under one of five different series, allowing them to concentrate on consistently supporting and polishing those five rather than delving into any new designs. The "Operational Combat Series", with its four previous titles, has been played long enough now to have the system ground down to a fine gloss finish, just in time for the long-awaited jewel in the OCS crown, DAK: Deutsches Afrika Korps. DAK is a huge game and, that being said, I will admit that I have not played the DAK campaign game through. I also suspect that there are quite a lot of other people who will never get to play the entire campaign game. At the same time, though, quite a few others will play it, and that is one of the series-game's strengths and, I suspect, one of Dean's reasons for designing DAK to begin with. The result? an all-out, massive North Africa campaign that will be played, argued and enjoyed by all who buy it. I did play the campaign game up to Rommel's arrival and played all the scenarios up to and through Crusader. Laid out end-to-end, the nine feet of DAK map covers the classic Rommel dance floor from Mersa Brega to the Nile and even somewhat beyond that. As usual with the OCS, we have 3-day game turns (makes for a long game) and the usual OCS map scale. Unit sizes vary a lot. Most of the Italian infantry is in divisions. The German and British formations are all brigades and battalions with a few odd companies (such as the Italian 10th Army Field Bordello unit with its decidedly non-NATO symbol) here and there. Dean has also included the Egyptian National Army and a few scattered Senussi tribesmen units (note to Dean: did Moamar G. ever get his complimentary copy?), perhaps more for interest and spice than for any possible effect on the game. Aside from the bordellos, Egyptians and Senussi, Dean has made some other departures not only from prior NA games but from his own OCS series. DAK introduce new OCS optional rules that will be standard in the upcoming OCS version 4.0 rules. These introduce supply costs for flying aircraft (no more free flying artillery), small unit screening actions, barrage supply costs based on the weight of the barrage, attack coordination issues that restrict combat exploitation eligibility, and many others. The optional rules are easy to assimilate, fold well into prior OCS experience, and, so far, have enhanced the play of the game. The biggest difference between DAK and the other OCS games is that Dean has included leaders and battlegroups (kampfgruppen and ragruppamente)… Rommel for the Germans, while the Italians get Maletti and the Brits have O'Connor, Campbell and several others. The leader and battlegroup markers function like reserve markers. They are rated for initiative so that during the reaction and exploitation phases, a successful initiative die roll lets stacks topped off with leader and battlegroup markers move and fight. The German Kampfgruppen and Italian ragruppamento markers also function as "mini-division" HQ's for fueling purposes. If these leaders and battlegroups are used effectively, they can have a major effect on the play of the game since they allow reserve actions your opponent cannot predict by the handy expedient of seeing a stack with a reserve marker on it. Supply is handled differently in DAK, too. This is North Africa, not Russia, and you're not going to see 60-point supply dumps. If you're lucky, you may see three new supply points per turn. That and the large number of smaller units in the game mean that supply markers, the small change of the other OCS games, become the common coin of DAK. If counting supply points sounds silly to you, you'll quickly learn to respect and hoard them like water, because every last one can fuel or arm a unit in a supply-starved theater. Like Campaign for North Africa, its much-maligned predecessor lurking in the shadows, DAK is very much a logistics-driven game. Another change to standard OCS practice is the inclusion of random events. The game has three random events tables: common, less common and rare and ultra-rare random events. These events are rolled every turn. They include some phenomena to cover out-of-theater events such as Barbarossa or the fall of Greece and convoy raids, in the common events, through Rommel illnesses and trips to Berlin in the less common events. The rare and ultra-rare events give us Rommel bragging to the Italians (should have been a common event), Italian frogmen raids and so on all the way to scenes from Tomorrow the World, like the Fall of Gibraltar, Victory in Russia, and Franco joining the Axis. All of the events have some effect on the game, depending on their grandiosity. Normally, the events tend to fall into the common or less common variety, so nothing totally silly happens. What else does DAK offer besides sheer size and grandeur? Well, about 20 scenarios! Scenarios can be as small as a section of one map plus a handful of counters, to scenarios that let you start and play out the campaign game from different starting points. All of the major battles like Crusader, Gazala and the Alamein fights are covered, as well as O'Connor's Offensive, the Italian Invasion of Egypt and the smaller border battles of Operations Brevity and Battleaxe. I played only the early portions of the campaign so have to limit my observations to what I know from experience. Not long after DAK was released, our group got together to play. We started the campaign game with the Italian invasion of Egypt. There are two things that need to be pointed out about that. First, playing the Italians is futile. You can get as far as Sidi Barani (barely) but you can't stay in supply much further east than that. Except for a few bersaglieri and miscellaneous units, your army is a joke. Worse yet, once you get into Egypt, Mussolini rules force you to hunker down and stay there until the British invade Libya (behind you). If you think you're the sort of player who can take Mersa Matruh with the Italians, just try it with units action-rated 1 and 2 and next to no supply! In our game, O'Connor's Offensive kicked off in November 1940, a month ahead of the historical schedule. As my Commonwealth partner, Don Evans, was just starting to lay into the Italians in front of Sidi Barani, I went out onto the porch for a smoke. When I put my cigarette out and came back, he had already taken Bardia! It happened that fast. Fighting the 1940 Italians in this game is something like necrophilia. About the only thing that the Italians can do once the Brit fights back is to pull everything he can out of Egypt (and he won't get much out) and head for Tobruk. Tobruk has a small garrison in place and is surrounded by level-1 hedgehogs. If the Italians can pull some of his invasion force back into Tobruk and ship in a few units from Tripoli, it's the one place on the map where he can make a stand long enough to slow the British rampage. In fact, Tobruk is about the only really defensible point on all 5 maps so that, like in so many other NA games, it is the key to winning or losing. Another point I discovered is that DAK is not a true multi-player game. Perhaps by the time you get to 1942 and have larger forces you'll need more hands, but in the early going, there are just too few units on the map for more than one person per side to deal with at a time. Next Two Scenarios The next two I tried were the British Brevity and Battleaxe scenarios. True to their history, the Brits couldn't break through the Axis lines to relieve Tobruk and, as scenarios, they are not very competitive. There is no depth to British attacks, and there is little in the way of Axis reserves to cause any excitement. They do make good training scenarios though. Once you get to the Crusader scenario, the pot starts to boil and you get a feeling for what this game is all about. Tobruk is, of course, the Commonwealth objective, and the road there is strewn with scattered groups of mobile Italian and German forces. Aside from the Halfaya Pass escarpment area, Tobruk, and a ridge or wadi here and there, there isn't much terrain. That, and the high unit mobility, together with reserves and the standard OCS non-ZOCs, creates a battle that plays and feels more like a naval engagement than a land war. It gets very hard to find the front line, if one even exists. You can define a front of sorts by hedgehogging small infantry units with AT detachments in places like Sollum or Halfaya Pass but they get quickly bypassed and forgotten. It is out in the open desert along the Trigh el Abd that the real fighting gets done as forces engage, get pushed back, are surrounded or surround others and pull surprise counterattacks. If you're more used to Russian Front combat with river lines, woods and towns to define and anchor your line, you're going to be lost when you fight a large battle in DAK. Classic Blitzkrieg encirclements mean next to nothing here and all is confusion, second-guessing and split-second timing. I found it very evocative of everything I had ever read about the theater. I also found it a lot harder to win a fight. Since I never finished the campaign, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as more units enter the theater, and tanks on both sides get up-gunned. I also have to point out that there are long periods in which nothing at all happens. Supply is always short. Even moving supplies around is a challenge with trucks that cannot carry more than a minuscule amount. Lots of time is spent building (and safeguarding) dumps. You also have to deal with new unit arrivals. The Afrika Korps has to "declimatize" on its arrival. It can drive around and fight, but its action ratings are all reduced by 1 until October 1941 (which seems excessively long to me). The CW units meanwhile, are often "locked" into training when they arrive. On top of it all, the Axis player has to deal with Malta and gets to use his air force to try to mollify some of the effects that island-fortress has on his logistical lifeline. Both sides have coastal ports for use in shipping supply and units. The ports are rated for their capacities, with Benghazi and Tobruk being the best. Dean didn't leave a single port out of the game. Ports with capacities as small as a single box of pasta (but no "Pasta Rule") are included. The use of those minuscule ports creates two anomalies. Units can check their trace supply to any port. That being the case, 1-token ports, like Sidi Barrani or Zuetina, can provide trace supply to a whole army, which doesn't make much sense given their size. Another anomaly is a special rule which states that a unit of any size can be shipped into any port. Why rate ports for their supply capacities while giving them unlimited ability to unload men and equipment? Seems like a designer's shortcut to me - and an unhistorical one at that - and I've seen strange use made of it. One point I've had trouble accepting in DAK is the lack of Italian infantry division breakdowns. The Italian divisions all end up being one-hex units, which is not only unhistorical but bothersome to the Axis player, who needs to garrison airfields and dumps. I can't think of any reason why the Italians can't have their divisions break down into regiments when this was done historically. During Crusader, Savona Division, for instance, was spread out in an arc between Sidi Suleiman and Bardia, quite a large front to cover. You can't do that in DAK. The division could be put in Bardia or some other place but it could never cover the ground it did during the historical battle. The Axis counter mix does include numerous independent machine gun battalions, oasis units and other small units, but it seems an arbitrary abstraction to keep the Italian infantry divisions all stuck to just a single hex each. There is so much to DAK that I couldn't reasonably cover it in this space. This includes unit development (tank battalion upgrades and for the CW, infantry unit reorganizations), minefields, Brandenburgers and Long-Range Desert Groups, and of course, the Axis air campaign against Malta. We've seen a lot of this in other games but this is the first time it has all appeared in a well-polished, tried and tested series like the OCS. How it will all hold together will be seen over time. Meanwhile, I can't imagine any serious student of North Africa not wanting to play at least a scenario of DAK. Many readers may have been hoping to see this review compare DAK and Campaign for North Africa. Well, I'm not about to put my head into that weed-whacker! I will say that I have played, and like, CNA and emphatically deny its reputation for being unplayable…if you ignore the unusable air game. DAK is easier to pick up and learn, but playing it will probably take about as long as CNA, though, and the logistical restraints will try your patience just as much. About the most I will say is that both games have 5 maps and they are both uncommonly rewarding and interesting games. Enough? CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphics: Usual Gamers; top-notch. Playability: An easy learn for experienced OCS players. For beginners, there are a lot of small scenarios to use for learning the system. Solitaire workable if you have lots of time on your hands. Replayability: The fluid nature of the North African battlefield lends itself to all sorts of new feats and exploits. Creativity: Same system (OCS), some different applications. Wristage. What you'd expect for a game on this level. Historicity: I have my doubts about the inability to spread out Italian infantry divisions and the use of ports in DAK, but the pace of operations, the lulls and then the armored free-for-alls reflect everything I ever read about this campaign. Comparisons: As big and deadly as CNA, though more accessible and complete. Overall: A large, fascinating, detailed simulation of a very confusing campaign. Not for the faint of heart, nor the small of table. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #27 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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