Europe Engulfed
A play of 1942-45 scenario reveals a
problem
I've played the 1942 scenario of Europe Engulfed
quite a few times, and while I like it a lot for being an interesting situation,
the end of the world syndrome in late '43 always seemed a little unsatisfying.
So we decided to start in 1942, but play through 1945 - or as long as time
allowed, anyway.
I was the Soviets. The
Germans made an attempt on Moscow, which ultimately failed, but didn't result in
catastrophe as attempting to take Stalingrad and Baku often does; so the Germans
fell back, and the Soviets started building up their
army.
I've been trying to determine if
building the Elite units serves any purpose for the Soviets. For the Germans,
elite units of both types make a lot of sense, mainly because they're cheap to
SR (a factor I had not previously weighted enough), but also because they are
easy to counterattack and reinforce with. Post-1942, though, it's not clear that
either of these is much of a factor for the Soviets, and maybe they should
simply go with mass. I actually built a Soviet Elite Tank unit just because I
had never seen it done, but I'm not clear it's a good
idea.
In our game, the Germans actually
held on for quite a while in Russia, as Matt never let his army get mauled, so I
was hard pressed to create a real breakthrough as in previous games playing
against more aggressive German players. In fact, by 1945, the Germans still had
not been completely evicted from Russia. The bad news, from the German
perspective, is that the money spent in Russia meant the Western Allies had an
easier time of it in Italy, and when they finally invaded France in 1944, the
western defense were very thin.
We had
to call it in 45 due to time, and it was actually still a fairly close game,
although I think the Allies were in pretty good shape with the situation in
France.
So what was the problem, you
ask?
While some of my friends have
quite enjoyed Europe Engulfed, it hasn't quite caught on around here to the
point that I get to play as much as I'd like. Part of it is certainly the
complexity, perceived and actual. While I don't think of EE as being in the same
high-complexity ballpark as many of GMT's games, and while it's a lot simpler
than competing games like World in Flames or Advanced Third Reich, it's still
not a simple game - and I think the lack of decent player aids is a significant
problem. Compared with the very nice aids in Barbarossa to Berlin, Europe
Engulfed's one-page reference sheet is almost worthless, being mostly consumed
with the neutral power setup and a table for figuring out percentages for U-Boat
losses. Given the non-trivial amount of fiddly complexity in EE, a decent
reference sheet would, I think, make this game much more
accessible.
I was trying to think of
good games that have actually been killed by the lack of decent reference cards,
and the only one I could come up with was Moments in History/Critical Hit's
Royal Tank Corps - although admittedly player aids were only a fraction of that
otherwise excellent game's production problems. There are certainly plenty of
good games that have been damaged by a lack of good aids, though, including
Monty's Gamble: Market-Garden, Battlelines, and even Storm over Arnhem. GMT has
generally been quite good about this, but I think it's certainly a significant
omission here. For medium-complexity games like Grant Takes Command, OCS,
Barbarossa: Army Group North, Kasserine, and Ukraine '43, the good player aids
make a big difference. It's tough to keep all that stuff in your head,
especially if you're just trying to play and haven't made a study of the game
yet.
So I've added making up a decent
one-page player aid for this game to my list of projects.
Posted: Saturday - August 21, 2004 at 08:02 PM