Ardennes '44
What moron thought a major armored offensive
through the middle of a dense, poorly-roaded forest in winter against a
heavily-armed enemy was a good idea? And what does Carthage have to do with
it?
I finally had a chance to play GMT's recent
Ardennes '44, and I liked it quite a bit. This is, quite frankly, odd - because
Ardennes '44 is a classic, retro wargame, with hexes, ZOCs, CRTs. The sort of
unimaginative thing I often rail against. Heck, this game is so retro it doesn't
even have overruns. No reaction phase, no reserves, no exploitation, no
motorized movement phase. Not even a 3:2 column on the CRT. Just move, fight,
move, fight. So what's the deal? Why did I like it so much? Perhaps I should add
one more piece of information ... the designer is Mark "Hannibal: Rome vs.
Carthage" Simonitch.
Now, Mr. Simonitch
may not be the Reiner Knizia of wargame design (most obviously because he simply
isn't that prolific), but he's probably the closest we've got, from my
experience. I say this for a few reasons: he clearly carefully considers
everything he puts into the game. He obviously has not lost sight of the fact
that while simulation is important in these things, the simulation is still a
rather distant second in importance to the game. And he clearly understands game
design as craft - he appears to have a healthy respect for quality playtesting,
and has a sense of balance in his
designs.
Take the lack of overruns in
Ardennes '44, for example. Overruns are arguably a bit of a hack, preventing
small units from holding back large advances on large timescales. A game with
"better" OOB work would probably have produced a large number of small,
specialty units of marginal individual combat effectiveness, which would then
require an overrun rule to prevent their ahistorical employment (the Field
Ambulance unit from Storm Over Arnhem, anyone?). Fortunately, Mark hasn't
cluttered the game up with these units - units here are almost exclusively
regiments with no divisional support units - and at this time and place (the
middle of a big forest with limited front widths and massive traffic problems)
the battle just isn't that fluid. So, a very limited overrun/exploit ability was
just cleanly built in to the CRT and the advance-after-combat rules. Lots of
stuff that wasn't needed is omitted, and life is
good.
The other big trap wargame
designers seem to fall in to sometimes is to think of their games as
simulations. Clearly, they are not; if you want to produce a playable game, a
designer has to pick and choose a couple elements of the battle they want to
really work with, and not get bogged down in the rest of the details. For
Ardennes '44, these elements are traffic and the generally constricted nature of
the battlefield. The traffic rules are wonderfully simple - just a few traffic
chits your opponent places each turn - and yet tremendously effective in
generating the same massive headaches for the players as they did for the
commanders. This is especially true because traffic conditions remain rather
unpredictable, and so the decisions the player makes are operational in nature,
and not those of a traffic cop.
Perfect.
Another interesting element is
the dual-layer combat results table. The main CRT is basically one we're all
familiar with (A1, DR2, that sort of thing), but it's surprisingly benign - a
lot of retreats, not so many defender casualties. However, there are a lot of
"firefight" entries, in which the attacker can decide to either "press home" the
attack, or quit. If he "presses home" the attack, combat moves to a much
bloodier CRT in which odds no longer matter and quality (elite vs. green, bigger
tanks vs. smaller tanks) is everything - but the attacker puts his best unit at
risk (normally losses are at the owner's discretion). This is really nice, it
does a great job of showing the bitter resistance the Americans put up and the
difficulties the Germans had and losses they suffered in evicting them. It's
been demonstrated how easy it is to put together a Bulge game out of spare parts
from other places (The Gamer's Ardennes, Bitter Woods); it's nice to see a game
where the designer has clearly really thought about every element that has gone
into it.
Lastly, the game perfectly
captures the constrained nature of the front lines themselves through the
limited stacking rules (usually only two pieces to a hex ... which has other not
insubstantial playability benefits) and the unit cohesion stacking and attack
rules. Units of the same parent organization stack more easily together, and you
have have only two divisions attack a given target at once - which makes
bringing massive force to bear surprisingly difficult, and once the US gets
concentrated and dug in, beating them will be a matter slowly chewing them up at
great cost.
Take these fundamentals,
throw in some nice flavor like Night rules, Tank qualtiy, and tanks vs. tank
destroyers - all of which is pretty clean but important to the game, and almost
never descend to the level of simply being chrome - and you get a classic,
medium-complexity but highly playable game. I particularly like those night
rules, which are elegant and simple yet add a nice piece of depth to the
game.
Now, Ardennes '44 is not perfect.
The most serious complaint I have is just the usual one of these games, and that
is the downtime. There is a bit of sit around and wait for your opponent to
move, and while it's really not bad at all for a game of this scale (the Gamers'
Ardennes is much worse), after years of playing Great Campaigns of the American
Civil War or Breakout: Normandy or ASL, it pays to remember that it just might
be a good idea to bring some good light reading along. My only other major
complaint is actually a graphic design one. Unusual, since Mr. Simonitch is the
best in this department, but it would be nice to see some color stripes or
somthing to designate a unit's parent division, since this matters for attacks
and can be a bit hard to see.
One last
thing, and I think the real reason why I liked this a lot: it's a great
game,
and by that I mean that the game confronts you with interesting choices all the
time, choices that feel like you are really playing a game and not struggling
against or gaming a system, as is far too often the case in these things. I
played the Germans, and I always felt like I had real options. There were
several legitimate strategic choices of where to attack to get the required VPs,
and then lots of operational choices as you can re-route offensives to get
around traffic problems or take advantage of the same in your opponent's
network, allocate your strategic movement capability wisely, budget your
critical corps-level artillery, maintain flexibility to take advantage of local
opportunities, and decide between blasting right through
now
before the Americans are reinforced or trying to work around the flank. There
then are essentially zero fiddly micro-management type decisions (just as
crucially), the sort of things I usually
don't
like to do in this scale of game, things like making sure your HQs or AA units
are properly positioned, managing the airplanes back at base, or fiddling with
divisional assets like artillery or AT guns which realistically were not under
operational control.
So all in all,
Ardennes '44 got a thumbs up from me. This is still a big, meaty game which will
take a while to play in its "real" format, playing out the whole battle. Plan on
a couple of sessions. But it is quite manageable, unlike many big games these
days, and you won't need to play twice just to get the hang of it. The game
plays cleanly and comfortably in pretty short order, the complexity is right in
the same happy zone as Mr. Simonitch's other games, there are lots of choices,
and the game does an excellent job of reflecting the battle. What's not to
like?
Posted: Saturday - January 17, 2004 at 07:58 PM