River and road nets around Bastogne; copyright OSG

PUMPING FAT

There is an axiom in this industry that it is impossible to design a bad game on the Battle of the Bulge. (The corollary to this is, of course, that you can make lots of money with a Bulge game.) This maxim is really being put to the test lately, and, at last count (which is probably wrong anyway), there were nine games on the subject, some of which are, mercifully, no longer with us. And there are at least two more coming! (SPI always has a Bulge game in the works.)

Although I believe the Bulge Maxim to be generally correct, there are exceptions. For those of you with a high pain threshold and long memories, there was Hitler's Last Gamble, a virtually unmitigated disaster truly worthy of the Rand trademark; their maxim must have been "Poor Designs Are Best Left Undeveloped". Yet, aside from that, almost all other Bulge games are, within their design intent, a lot of fun to play. The situation is so inherently tense and both sides are given so many strategic and tactical options that it is almost impossible to design even a mediocre game on the subject. However, if you give anyone enough opportunity , they can do almost anything. And OSG gave Danny Parker just that opportunity.

Now Danny is an amiable and able game designer who did an exceptional job with SPI's Ardennes Quad, which is now, all things considered, the best of the Bulge games. Having done some good research (in which he received some aid from others) and come up with a bushelful of ideas, Danny finally pared them down to what is now the Ardennes Quad.

Unfortunately, he had some ideas left over. What is worse, he decided to use them - the result being Dark December.

There is no denying that Dark December is an impressive physical package; this in an age where few companies are sparing any expense in dressing up their games. If one company uses four colors on their maps, the next company will use six. Games abound with "study folders", "Historical background materials", etc., and a game with less than three different-colored counters is considered declasse.

OSG, which has a very strong art department (even considering its relative youth as a company), is not one to be shortchanged in the window- dressing department. OSG's art department is headed by Larry Catalano, one of the myriad ex-SPI employees at OSG. After years of indentured servitude to the House of Muted Shades, Larry has broken free from his chains and indulged himself in a riotous orgy of color. His maps are a visual realization of Robinson Crusoe at a bordello.

Viewing his work with Panzerkrieg, Rommel & Tunisia, Napoleon at Leipzig, and now Dark December, it is easy to conclude that Larry abhors clear terrain, for it is almost impossible to find an uncolored hex in a Catalano map. In Dark December, we have a backdrop of shades of green (often hard to distinguish between) against highlighted splashes of orange and blue. Now, orange and blue might look good on the Mets (if anything looks good on the Mets), but all maps with such color schemes should come with printed warnings from the Surgeon General. (Remember John Hill's original Bar Lev map of some years previous? You needed cornea transplants after two playings.)

The remainder of the package is quite nice. The counters are well-made and as colorful as one can get with WWII. Moreover, they're readable, which is more than can be said for OSG's previous effort, Napoleon at Leipzig. The box is also very arresting, resembling as it does, a book cover. There is no doubt that OSG produces a very fine physical product, with as appealing a set of graphics as anyone else's (even though they tend to overdo it a bit).

This brings to mind, tangentially, Eric Goldberg's recent column in Moves, in which he railed mightly against good packaging obscuring poor product (something which is, shall we say, not unknown in the history of American marketing). While I certainly agree with Eric that four-color covers are no substitute for readable rules or workable CRT's, I think that he is tilting at windmills. The corollary of his thesis seems to be either that bad games should have lousy artwork (which is not only plainly silly but I don't think is what Eric wanted to say) or that companies should spend more time working on the games than on packaging.

Now, the latter is not a very disputable thesis. However, that is where Eric idealistically misses the point. For a small - and often unknown - company to get into, and stay in, business, it must sell its product and sell it fast. Most people are reluctant to purchase a new product - or, in this instance, shell out to a new company - and the only way to overcome this reluctance is for the companies to advertise.

That is why you always see huge TV/Print media campaigns for new products: the company makes the product familiar to the consumer before he buys it. Game companies, at least at this level, cannot do that. So they must travel the only other road open to them: flashy packaging.

Americans have always been suckers for flashy packaging - what other country would buy a car with enough chrome to bankrupt Rhodesia (or whatever it's called nowadays) - and any publisher with even minimum neural action knows it. "if it looks good, it must be good . . . ." You've got to get the customer to look at your product, because if he doesn't make that first step he'll never make the second. And the new companies, or most of them, know all of this, which is why they have chosen to concentrate on packaging. As consumers we may not appreciate the results, but it is a cold fact of business.

To take a company to task for doing such is to tell them to go against all the known proclivities of buyers. Sure, many of the games are sucking wind uphill; but does Eric really think they would have been any better if they had been dumped into Grand Union paper bags and tied with a piece of string? What it amounts to is that we're getting a large number of people who may not know how to balance a CRT or develop a Sequence of Play but they sure as hell know how to make you think it'll all work. And if that's not exactly cricket, that's the way America works.

Now what does all this have to do with Dark December? Nothing ... and everything, because DD is the perfect example of packaging disguising inherent flaws in what is essentially a mediocre product. I should be quick to point out here that OSG did not want DD to be a mediocre product; you simply cannot put out great games all the time (or even some of the time for some companies). However, you can try to sell each product as if it was a winner.

Dark December is not a winner, although it is not a "bad" game in the sense that it is boring or unplayable. It is neither of these. The rules are clear and clearly written (which is somewhat unusual for OSG), the system is laid out nicely, and there are few charts to wrestle with and few obscure "if this happens then do this but if this happens then do that" type rules. The situation is inherently a good one for gamers, and playing time is reasonable. So why doesn't it work?

As I stated before, this is Danny Parker's second game on the Bulge, and it comes right on the heels of his first game. It also contains a great number of ideas that seem to have been discarded from the first game. The result of all this is, whether intended or not, a distinctly stale aura. Part of this may be due to my having played so many other Bulge games, but most of it comes from a vague sense of designer deja vue.

Balance

The major problem area, however, is the balance, and the balance problem can trace its roots directly back to a most unfortunate CRT. The CRT appears, at first glance, to be your standard odds/ratio, step- loss table. It is not; its results rely almost entirely on the terrain of the defender, and virtually all results (except at the fringes of the table) are the same: either lose a step or move back. Now it's the little word "or" that causes all the trouble, because the optional retreat renders the CRT bloodless; the defender, when able, can always choose to get away to fight again.

And that's just what the Americans do at the beginning. The Germans move in at overwhelming odds, the Americans retreat two hexes after combat - without a loss - and then move back in to block movement again. Consequently, German movement is slowed far greater than actuality and the resultant breakthroughs just never seem to occur at the right time.

This is not to say that the Americans can fight a steady retreat or that the Germans find it hard slogging; there are many places where US troops are wiped out and the Germans get through. It's just that the "Ardennes Two-Step" happens far too often for the Germans to make any concerted drive to the west. In both games I played (taking each side once), the Germans never really threatened Bastogne and were out of the game by 20 December. (And so was 1.)

There are several optional rules included that can alleviate this problem, among them a nice Reserve rule and a much-needed (for balance) Disengagement rule. Why the latter was not given as a standard rule is beyond me, for it is a simple rule, only one paragraph long. Without it, the Germans just get hung up in too many places.

The rest of the game is fairly standard Bulge - weather and reinforcements are handled in the usual manner, as is bridge blowing and construction. (The latter hampers the Germans in a very curious way, but since the effect is the same I suppose it's OK.) The road network is pretty good, and the armor superiority rules tend to give some needed help to the Axis, if they can get their panzers; down from the north and into play.

There is one further problem, one that is not the designer's fault but is something that seems to be endemic to OSG games. The set-up is a pain in the ass. Why is it so hard to simply list the units and their starting areas/hexes in such a way so that it doesn't require a trip to Delphi to determine where everything goes? DD is one of the better games that OSG has in this area, but the initial set-up is still no laughing matter. Games like Panzerkrieg and Leipzig are virtually indecipherable in terms of placing units on the map. Most unfortunate.

OSG is a company that, at least at this point, is most eager to produce quality games, games which will intrigue the players and titillate the distributors. However, in their anxiety to publish a workable WWII title, one with some good sales bite, they have ended up with a lot of excess baggage. In its physical treatment, in its general system, in its lack of new insight into the battle, and in its simple state of being, this Bulge game is just a spare tire around the midsection of the hobby.