Initial Set up Fall 1939. The French are a bit under-strength. Surprisingly the Germans are a decent strength on the West Wall.
One Small Step (OSS) Games rerelease of 2WW: The War in Europe (2WW) I actually waited for as I never had played the original. I don't even recall it being released (frowny face). In fact, I am at a loss to recall the last strategic level game of this variety I have played. GMT's Triumph and Tragedy ((T & T) was the last one, but it's a vastly different game from 2WW. T & T is a block game, area focused and card driven. The only common touchstone the two games share is they are both about WWII. This was the game I waited for most eagerly of all the new releases from OSS because I don't recall the last time I played a game of this type that seemed to offer so much.
The Allies decide to launch a Counter-Attack (dumb idea) to retrieve the situation in Holland and events turn out poorly.
COMPONENTS
I was very pleasantly surprised by the overall curb appeal of the game. Nice thick Cardstock Player Aids. Decent counters. Nice rulebook with graphic examples of play. But it's the map that will catch your attention. It's a mounted map and overall I give it an A-, only due to its darkness and several names being washed out like Baghdad. The visual appeal is like those old SPI games with the Checkerboard Turn Record Chart (TRC) and Area Movement Boxes. They even placed the most critical tables for building and upgrading reduced units on the map. In addition on the TRC, you can track the growth of the Lend Lease Multiplier and when new forces can possibly enter play. I do wish OSS would do something different with their counters - this is my personal taste here. Maybe it's the font. Maybe's it's the flat matte finish. Maybe it's the slightly undersized typed and thinnish counters but why not upgrade them somehow? I would buy optional counters with silhouettes on them for this game, doing say one ME-109, 1 FW-190...
RULES
I've been sometimes a bit under thrilled with some of the OSS rulebooks to other games. Some suffered from a lack of proofing. I hammer my graduate students hard for that lack of TLC. 993
Here - we have a Rule Book of 16 pages that is clean as a whistle. Being well proofed sets my mind at ease because it's the first sign that someone reviewed items. In fact I felt pretty comfortable after one read through, but went back to see if there were any booby traps that I missed that were buried in some obscure manner. Nope - good clean and functional rules. I do wish they had included a Reference Page for terms as sometimes the more obscure things like the whole conquering a country routine is hard to find. But I was able to get up and playing, with no real errors on my part.
GAME PLAY
WW II strategic games I think are the hardest to get right. There are simply too many aspects to them to not have something go amiss. SPI's WW II was fun, but it had more than several flaws that sunk the game. Avalon Hill's Third Reich was a bit of a mini-monster. To fully enjoy the economic aspects you needed others, which lessened its solitaire suitability. Avalon Hill's reprint of Hitler's War was interesting, highly rated by folks but here's the kicker - no one has found it that worthy to republish. What's interesting is folks liked this when it was published under Game Fix back in the 1990's.
Like one would expect, you dine on Poland early. Should be easy but this is where you need to pay attention to the game's Combat Chart, nee Combat Results Table (CRT). The CRT has eight different types of combat listed, from ASW combat, to City Bombing to Land combat among others. Normally these charts leave me a bit cool, but I liked this one. But back to the Poles - you need to understand units are 1 or 2 steps and to kill them you need to kill both steps. The only way to ensure that is to increase the number of combat factors in play against in a given attack. Against Poland, not so much of a problem. Western front, more so dependent upon when you attack and the Eastern Front - oh it can be an unmanageable headache.
For the Germans, you need to carefully look at your forces. Unlike in War in Europe the old SPI game, your Siegfried Line forces aren't shell units. That allows you to take some huge early risks in play. But in doing so, you might allow the Soviets a freer hand in Eastern Europe than they had historically. You have less than a handful of units and the risk management you have to practice is quite intense. 993