Right from the start, when just reading the rules, this game impressed me and five games later I’m still impressed. Okay so the rules are a bit vague in places and It is a bit unbalanced but the system is just so good at recreating the campaign that I can overlook such trivialities.
Some years ago I made a serious attempt at Command magazines ‘Blitzkrieg 1940’ game on basically the same topic. It was twice the size and half as interesting as the Vae Victis offering. It was fine example of why Command has gone down hill, a dull game that abstracted out all the features of the campaign.
France 1940 on the other hand is packed with interesting and flavoursome rules, virtually none of which were in the Command game. There are paratroop assaults, surprise river crossings, armour superiority, troop quality, devastating German airpower, refugee columns, terror bombing, British evacuation, inability of garrison troops to retreat, fortifications and slow Allied response. One attractive feature is that it manages to achieve this with astonishingly simple rules.
One feature I particularly like was the Mechanised attack rule. Infantry units, if they attack, must attack everything they are adjacent to. Mechanised units on the other hand can select which adjacent stacks they wish to attack. This is a simple but effective representation of blitzkrieg warfare. It makes the German panzer units very powerful. They race ahead, smashing selectively through virtually any position, using surprise river crossings and airpower. The poor old infantry slog along behind trying to keep up and clean up. Gosh, sounds just like France 1940 does not it!
The great risk we found for the Germans is that their panzers need to be handled delicately, they can absorb limited casualties. Weaken them too much and German attack strength can start dwindling very fast. The French should always be on the lookout for a selective counterattack against a weak unsupported German panzer corp.
Sure the rules could be a bit better but we played the game quite successfully. I sent two long sets of questions to Jean-Claude Bésida and he was very good in sending detailed and well reasoned replies. I summarised those and posted them on Grognards if any one is interested. There are still a few things I have minor reservations about. There are a number of events, terror bombing, and unopposed paradrops, where you get an automatic success. Never liked that and always think there should be some element of chance. On a similar point the Germans can virtually guarantee to conquer Holland by turn 2 once they know what to do. Again I think there should be some element of chance in this. In addition I wonder if perhaps the effectiveness of German planes should reduce as the campaign progresses and they move further from their bases.
As one player said ‘given the nature of the campaign, the biggest problem is getting somebody to play France’. It is a tricky situation. Once the breakthrough at Sedan had occurred then things were going to be very tough for the Allies, although I think they could have done a lot better than they did. If the Germans had been held at Sedan then I think it possible the Allies could have held on and perhaps even forced a stalemate. The game however is somewhat one sided and very depressing for the French.
The victory levels need to be adjusted, simply to give the Allies some encouragement. For a start, reverse the rule about casualties. If the Allies lose less than double the casualties the Germans do then the victory level goes one in the Allied favour. We always had piles of Allied dead, usually three times that of the German loses. Note: the victory condition about destroying Allied armour are the wrong way round, the Germans have to destroy 6 British and 10 French armour stacking points.
Nevertheless, I think a determined Allied player can put up a good fight. The secret is delay, slow the Germans enough at the start and they may not have the time or the troops to achieve all their victory conditions by the end of the game. We did it once and got a draw. Most of the other games got abandoned either because the French player got demoralised or we ran out of time. Despite its size it is a bit long, although our first games were very slow due to learning the system and discussing the rules.
Overall a great game and well worth my subscription. Perhaps it does not have high replay value unless the rules and balance are tweaked a bit but certainly worth playing as a clever game that gives a high degree of historical authenticity.
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© Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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