On to Berlin!

I got a chance to play this at this year's Winter Offensive and thoroughly enjoyed the game. It went down to the wire, with my German's barely holding on to two core areas to eek out a win against the Allies. While the rules overhead is very minimal (something I really appreciate the older I get), the game still required the player to make many agonizing decisions on strategy. It also has a surprising depth for such a rules-lite design.

Players will be presented with valid reasons for attempting operations that actually happened. For example, there is a compelling reason for the Axis to invade Norway, or to march into the Balkans. But they aren't required to do that. Each decision will have both pros and cons. I like how units are differentiated. Powerful panzer armies can move fast, blitzkrieg, and shake off attacks. You will want to spend some of your precious strategy points researching their technologies so that you can add them to your force pool. However, their achilles heal is Allied air power, which can bypass their powerful defenses and bomb units at will. As the game goes on, and especially once the US gets involved, overwhelming Allied air power will bring the Axis to the brink of defeat. This is where another clever mechanism comes into play. The Axis must hold onto special resource areas to eek out a win, if they don't first achieve an auto victory early in the game.

Our game came down to Germany alone holding 2-3 core areas in the middle of their nation, while they were being relentlessly attacked from both east and west. The trick was that I needed to keep strong armor in two of those core areas to win, but I also needed to ensure that I was not fully stacked in those same areas, because I needed retreat routes between the two areas when retreats were called for due to Allied (mostly airpower) attacks. So, it became a tricky decision puzzle as to when to kill off a unit to free up some stacking space or to retreat a unit into an adjacent space. Because, if the next attack in an area causes a retreat result, the unit is eliminated if it has no where to go, due to stacking restrictions. Another interesting little twist was figuring out how best to use the Luftwaffe to defend, and even preempt some of those massive US/British air attacks. Seeing that the Allied player has just refreshed his bombers, do I send my planes against them and hopefully flip them to spent BEFORE they can do a massive ground attack into one of my core areas. Or do I save my planes and use them to go after some of his powerful ground units. Just lots of great, agonizing decisions in this game, all without tons of rules to keep in your head. So, enough rambling. If you like the idea of playing out the entire war in Europe in just a few hours, with minimal rules, but lots of decisions to make, I would highly recommend picking this game up. -- Jamey Cribbs