LA BATAILLE DU MATZ (Nicolas STRATIGOS) VVn°24
For the 80 years of the end of the Great War, Vae Victis could not do better than to publish a game about 1918; especially as 1914-18 is the soupe de jour of US designers these days.
Designed by the very prolific Nicolas Stratigos, La Bataille du Matz, is both a big game and a simple game. It recreates the German offensive of 8-12th of June 1918 in Oise area, towards Compiègne, one of the final offensives of Ludendorff. Four German Army Korps, with four Stosstruppen divisions, and a dozen of normal divisions, some A7V and powerful artillery, try to pierce the French front held by three very weak army corps, to the rush for Paris. A lot of counters at the regiment scale, a standard VV map at 1.3 km the hex and eight turns make the game. Rules are easy and quite classic, look like those of Over the Top recently published by Decision Games.
The game turn is divided, for each player, by four principal phases: movement and combat for everybody, and exploitation and combat for commanded units and Stosstruppen. To be in command a unit must be in range of its Army corps HQ at the beginning of its turn. Combat is preceded by barrages fires and airplanes bombing, which can disrupt or damage the enemy. Tanks and Stosstruppen can infiltrate between enemy ZoC, that is very useful because movement is slow, with few movement factors for troops and big terrain costs. Do not bother trying to make large breakthrough like those of WWII, here troops are crawling slowly and dying quickly. Air rules are easy with beautiful icons on the counters to distinguish bombers from fighters, and in my opinion are much too effective.
The game plays smoothly with a vigorous German push against sparse French lines, but the TRC is rough for attacker and even with high odds, a step lose is guaranteed every other time. The barrage fire also is a real killer and each side can concentrate all the artillery from the army corps to ensure a step loss or disorganisation of one enemy stack. So, with difficult terrain to cross, step losses for attack and attrition for the best troops with barrage fires, German progression will be slow, to arrive like history, in front of the second French trench line. At that time, the French got reinforcements, historically ordered to attack, but here useful to fill the gaps and block the German progress. It will be hard to achieve a clear victory for each player...
For the Armistice birthday, Vae Victis gives us a good and thoughtful game with plentiful artillery, tanks, stosstruppen and planes. Only the size and the foreseen result should limit the usage of this superb gem.
CHV: There are some similar features coming out of this useful series of reviews. The slowness of the games in terms of movement and combat, and their difficulty in achieving play balance.But I too feel there is solid improvement in games that are such a bargain. If you lack translations of the rules e-mail me for some.
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© Copyright 1999 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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