Part 1

In Part 1, I had described some elements of two games dealing with the 1940 campaign in France: France, 1940, the Avalon Hill game from 1972, and Blitzkrieg 1940, a game appearing in Command magazine in 1997, 25 years later. My purpose in looking at the two games was to describe some of the changes that seemed to have taken place in wargaming over the 25 year interval, and also to play the two games in tandem to see how each game played out.

I hope to describe some of the game play in this installment. In fact I had hoped to describe the playing of each game all the way through, but for reasons I’ll describe later, I don’t think that’s going to happen this time out. I’ll get to that, but first there are a couple of other important issues in the campaign that I would like to describe. These include Eben Emael and the handling of paratroopers, the treatment of the Maginot Line, and the air game.

Eben Emael

The Germans shocked the world when they succeeded in neutralizing the vaunted Belgian fortress Eben Emael with the use of airborne forces, and both games include rules for doing so. In Blitzkrieg 1940, the German player has the use of five airborne coups de main counters, each representing battalion to regimental sized forces.

On turn 1, the German played decides how many of these he wishes to use, and then figures out where he wants the unit to land. There are some restrictions on terrain type, but they are minimal and the German player is permitted, or even subtly encouraged, to use all of them just about anywhere he wants. To deploy them, the German player places each counter in sequence, rolling 1d6 for each one. The first unit survives its landing on a roll of 1 through 5, the second on a roll of 1 through 4, and so on. Any units that don’t survive go right into the dead pile, with the loss of two German steps per counter.

All you have to do to take out Eben Emael with these guys is simply survive the landing on top of the fort. Which I did with my first airborne counter. That’s about all the paratroopers can do in Blitzkrieg 1940.

They have no zones of control, and they can’t move or attack (although they have a volatile defense factor of “0”, which means their defensive strength is whatever is showing on the face of 1d6 when they roll for that value).

In France, 1940, there is a lot more detail in the paratrooper subgame. First, their use is covered in a lengthy optional rule. In the background, for these rules, their actual numbers are listed as consisting of six battalions of airborne forces (parachute), and one airlanding division of 12,000 men consisting of four airlanding regiments.

These units are actually depicted by specific counters in the game, giving a level of detail and accuracy not seen in the XTR game. To give you some idea of the detail in these paratroop rules, I’ll explain that the map style rulebook (it folds up accordian style like a map) consists of 10 panels of paper. Each panel is about 5½” x 17” and is covered with, to my now aging eyes, a hopelessly small font size.

Each of the 10 panels is printed front and back, to make an equivalent of 20 pages of rules. In that sense, the small size of the Avalon Hill rulebook is a little deceptive. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the word count of the rulebook is actually greater than the XTR game.

In any case, the paratroop rules take up one side of one panel, or about 5% of the total rules booklet, and these are mostly procedural, “how to operate the paratroopers” types of rules. In actual length, the coups de main rules in the XTR game take up marginally more room (about 1 page out of 18 in the rule book) but they are mostly effects rules (like what happens if you land your coups de main units in Paris on turn 1-- like that’s going to happen).

In France, 1940, the airborne operations are broken down into two stages. In the first place, the airborne battalions must land on a hex. You can land more than one battalion in a hex, but once you put the number of battalions you intend to land into a hex, you must roll for their landing (i.e., the mission apparently can’t be aborted if the first battalion to land gets wiped out). You roll for each battalion ... on a 1 to 4 roll of 1d6, the battalion survives; on a 5 or 6, it’s destroyed on landing. So your expected value of surviving battalions is two out of six. This isn’t that much lower than the expected value of the landing units in Blitzkrieg 1940 (which is approximately 2.49 out 5), but the battalions that land have simply survived, they haven’t gone on to do anything of consequence yet.

If you land your airbornes on an occupied fortification (which Eben Emael was in the way that I set up the game), your Fallschirmjaegers destroy the fortification on only a roll of 1 or 2 (and the paratroopers are always themselves destroyed in the process).

The Eben Emael fortifications are represented by two fortified hexes in France, 1940; I put one regiment (three counters) on each fortified hex. One regiment failed to survive the landing process, and the other succeeded in wiping out one hex of the Eben Emael complex, although this regiment too was completely destroyed in the process. If you want to bring in the airlanding guys, they must be programmed to follow up on the hexes that the paratroopers have landed in and survived.

I failed to realize this rule, and so my airlanding guys did not get to the battle (not that they would have done anything as far as the fortress itself is concerned.).

There’s a lot of detail in the paratrooper rules for France, 1940, probably more than I wanted or needed. It may be the case that the paratrooper rules are more accurate in France, 1940 than are the coup de main rules and counters in Blitzkrieg 1940, but overall, I think I liked the XTR game better.

The Maginot Line

The Maginot Line in Blitzkrieg 1940 is represented by a host of counters representing something like the specific forts. There are two levels of fortifications, sometimes both flavors are stacked in the same hex. These counters have the same kind of volatile defense strengths as the rest of the French army.

The big forts have a defensive factor of +6, which makes them very difficult to take out. Although the Germans can get some victory points by breaching the Maginot Line, it seems like asking for trouble. In France, 1940 the Maginot Line consists of a terrain feature that adds 10 to the defensive power of the stack if the stack is attacked through the frontal hexes of the Maginot Line. Which makes it next to impossible for the Germans to get through.

But wait: the Germans get some special artillery counters that work exactly like the artillery counters in the Napoleonic battle games of the early 1970s: they can add their combat strength to an attack that is one hex distant from their location.

As wargaming mechanisms go, this probably represents as good a solution to the Maginot Line problem as any. But after all the detail that was put into the airlanding subgame, the artillery counter solution looks and feels like a kludge. Both games seem to be intent on teaching the same lesson: in the historical event, the Germans correctly analyzed the situation and wisely avoided attacking the Maginot defenses directly.

The Air Game

There are wargamers who get a big kick out of running a given campaign’s air war, and there are other wargamers who think it’s a big pain. Your response to what I have to say next is probably conditioned on the kind of gamer you are.

The Avalon Hill game has a lot more variety and detail in the air war subgame than the XTR game does. In France, 1940, each air unit consists of two elements, the actual airplane counter and the ground support forces and base. You can fly the planes off this base at several points in the turn to accomplish any of five different missions (Close support; Interdiction; CAP; Air superiority; and Interception). The Germans have eight such units, the British have one and the French have one. So you can see that the game is not set up to be balanced exactly, but rather to reflect what was probably a historical reality.

Like the paratrooper rules, the air rules seem rather involved to me, taking up about one page in the rule book (which for the Allies, is about how to use your essentially two counters).

The XTR game is much simpler in this regard ... basically there are only five RAF Spitfire counters that the Allies can roll for and commit at the risk of one victory point for the German player. This rule comes with the following design note: “The five RAF Spitfire counters represent the only aircraft units for either side in both scenarios. The air superiority achieved by the Luftwaffe in the 1940 campaign is built into the mechanics. It’s part of the Allied engagement and disengagement movement costs and helps account for the relative robustness of German units, reflected, particularly in the panzer divisions, in strength-steps and turn sequence flexibility.”

So the Stukas are factored into the game. Which of the two approaches works better? It’s a loaded question that I can’t answer even for myself after playing a little bit of both games.

I think it’s interesting to note that in the 25 year interval from the publication of France, 1940 to Blitzkrieg 1940, the later game seems to be simpler than the earlier game in at least two of the three categories I described in this post (Eben Emael and paratroopers and the air game) and only marginally more complex in one category (Maginot Line depiction.)

Playing the Games

As I wrote above, when I set these games up, my intention was to play through each of them in parallel for 10 turns.

According to my notes, I set the games up on July 28, thinking it would take me a couple of weeks or a month to play them. But then some other things happened, mostly the fact that our younger son (the only child we still have living at home) tried out for and made a premier level soccer team.

So we (that is, he and I) had a lot more travel time to practice and more weekend travel to tournaments in other states. I’m not blaming him ... campaigning with him and his team in soccer this summer and fall has been a blast, but it’s also kicked my butt in terms of free time.

So here it is, the end of October (or was when I wrote this) and I find that I’ve played a grand total of two turns in each game. I have done some other wargaming during this interval, mostly playing Dean Essig’s sailing ship game, which I’m not sure I’m even allowed to mention, but whatever. (I guess I may lose my grognard status if I don’t increase my playing time, but I sometimes think of myself as a former wargamer anyhow).

Anyway, I’ll give you what I have on the first two turns of each game, but I hope you’ll be understanding when I say that I have some other games and ideas that I want to try and so I need to move on. Let me discuss losses as they occurred in each game through two turns:

Blitzkrieg 1940	Turn 1	Turn 2
Netherlands	11 units (3 division sized)	5 units
Belgium	5 units (and Eben Emael)	3 units
France	0 losses	12 units
Great Britain	0 losses	1 step
Germany	4 infantry steps plus 1 airborne	3 units (plus 10 additional steps)
France 1940	Turn 1	Turn 2
Netherlands	2 units (all they had	0 units
Belgium	0 losses	2 units
France	0 losses	2 units
Great Britain	0 losses	0 units
Germany	6 paratroop battalions	0 units

In France, 1940 the units lost were all corps size (except for the German paratroopers). Taking that into account, the loss rates were actually pretty similar for the two games. For example, in Blitzkrieg 1940 after two turns the Niederlanders have only seven units left on the board, and there’s a good chance they would be wiped out in turn 3. I did a few things to help each game along. Thus for example, I duplicated Operation Sickle Cut in the Avalon Hill game, even though it had no rules for it.

In the XTR game I played with all of the Allied one step units (which includes I think everybody except the British units) inverted. I kept them inverted even from myself, because I think the concept of unknown strength really goes back to the great S&T game, Panzergruppe Guderian where, as the Russian player at least, you didn’t know what the quality of a given unit was going to be until you committed it to battle. My feeling is that the Allies were basically in a similar position in May and June of 1940.

In some objective sense of duplicating the first couple days of the campaign, both games performed well. That is, in both games, the Germans were able both to whale into the Belgian and Netherlands forces, as well as effect the breakthrough battle at Sedan.

I don’t know how the games would continue to play out, but after two turns, both games look positionally very similar. In the subjective sense though, there were some big differences in game play, time and feel. With regard to time, the Avalon Hill game played a lot faster than the XTR game did for me.

Even with the rules look-ups, and the relatively few counters on the map, the Avalon Hill game played in a fraction of the time of the XTR game. Now, it’s true that I didn’t exploit the features of the Avalon Hill air game that much; I pretty much used the German units for ground support, and that use is straightforward in the rules. But still, the difference in the amount of time you would have to invest to play each game is striking.

With an opponent who was reasonably familiar with wargames, I think you could play France, 1940 to conclusion (10 turns) in 2 to 3 hours. I just don’t see any way you could play the XTR game (10 turns) in the same amount of time. It will be interesting to see if there are others who have different impressions on this issue.

With regard to game play, I don’t know quite how to explain this. There were some things I liked about the Avalon Hill game: it reminded me of my 1970 VW beetle in that it started and it got you there. In that sense, there was nothing wrong with the game; it seemed like a good fit between the model and the situation, and maybe you could learn something about the campaign by playing the game.

The idea of the paper time machine seems very salient in this game: it seems designed to show you what happened, and within the restrictions of the format, why it happened. The XTR game is another story. By gearing the units down one level, there is a lot more loss going on than in the Avalon Hill game. This by itself created a certain visceral reaction. Plus there is this sense that the game is trying to tell you that all the Germans have to do is show up and bust a cap into any French division they want, and with one-step units, the French unit is just outta there.

To me, that was a very striking aspect of play in the XTR game. Is it accurate? I don’t know, but I was reminded when I was playing, and I am reminded now, of the discussion we had of spectacle effects in wargaming. Blitzkrieg 1940 isn’t just a model of what happened in what turned out to be a one-sided military contest. It also seems to be designed to show, using cardboard counters, what a contest between a modern military machine operating with deadly precision against hapless and hopelessly outmatched enemies, would look like and feel like.

In the first installment, and a little bit in here too, I had been giving plusses and minuses to each game on its handling of different aspects. If you’ve read this far, I suppose I owe you an overall plus or minus on the two games. Really though, I think the experience of each game, although different from each other, was interesting and valid in its own right.

It’s true that I was a little partial to the XTR game before I set them both up, thinking as I do, that Blitzkrieg 1940 was one of the better Command games to appear among the entire 54 issue run. In comparison, France, 1940 was less fun for me, but to be fair, I think it could still be a fun game played on its own.

(John Best is far too humble for my own good -ed)