Fast Action Battles:The Bulge is the first in a long (hopefully!) series of games brought to you by <PERSON>, author of famous Engulfed games and, well, Leaping Lemmings. Though the game was released four years ago (which is an era in the universe of board gaming and war gaming these days), I guess it's as appropriate moment to give it a well-deserved review as any other; the recent publication of a second installment in the game series, FAB:Sicily, makes my choice only easier.
FAB:The Bulge is a two player game, conveying the last <PERSON>'s offensive that took place in mid-December, 1944. Germans - or rather <PERSON> - cherished an unrealistic hope that they were still in a position to turn the tables of the war; they hoped to reach the cities of Antwerp and Brussels in a hectic and reckless, as it turned out, offensive. Capturing those two cities should have - according to <PERSON>'s twisted mind - made Allies more eager to pledge for peace which would, in the effect, leave the Germans with only one enemy to deal with i.e. the Russians.
FAB:The Bulge simulates first two weeks of the offensive i.e. the days when the plan actually could have worked (the offensive collapsed on about 24th December 1944; the battle of Ardennes ended one month later). The game ends on 28th December; after that day it would too one-sided.
In following sections I am going to review all the game concepts I do like and then write few sentences on the things I do not like that much. The sections are written in no particular order.
Unit quality
In FAB:The Bulge wooden blocks are used to represent units, each of them is a division or a brigade; such scale is about right for an operational game with a word fast in its name. 993
Whilst the idea of using wooden blocks in order to introduced a 'real' fog of war is nothing new and has been widely used in the board game industry before, the concept of unit quality is (at least to me!). Each edge of the block displays a number of pips; the number of the pips represents the unit strength and their colors -- the unit quality. And so the red pips are the elite unit, black -- the veterans, white -- the greens. Your division can then harden up, maturing from greenhorns, freshly sent to the front line, to veterans as they lose their strength; or quite contrary, they can lose their elite status, should they absorb at least one hit.
As you can see, 101st Division enters the game as an elite unit (as it should!) and keeps it even after being slightly wasted; should it become badly battered, however, it loses its prowess, becoming a standard 'veteran' division.
Simple and elegant twist that adds to the chrome, it is.
The victory conditions (aka game balance)
Let me start from saying that it is a hard task to implement really good victory conditions in a game simulating the Battle of the Bulge; or, in fact, in a game simulating any conflict, details of which are widely known, the disparity between two of the sides was so deep and the historical goals showed nothing but an insanity of the chief commanded who mapped them out. What could then constitute good victory conditions? I believe this question is as old as the war gaming itself; war gaming, as the name itself displays it clearly, is as different to war as game of SIMS is to a real life (though there are people who lost the ability to notice the difference in case of the latter but that's another kettle of fish). Well defined victory conditions should factor the (almost) perfect intelligence of both of the players, the pre-defined timing of reinforcements, predictable weather, simplified supply rules and other abstractions incorporated into the game mechanisms. Most of all, however, victory conditions should be designed in a way that both players, even though both know the historical outcome of the original campaign, should find the game enjoyable.
Diagram below: the reddish/pinkish outline marks the historical advance of the Germans. VP areas are marked with a green border.
<PERSON>, in his design, assumed that Germans couldn't have, even in the most optimistic hopes, made it to the Antwerp; instead, he assessed that crossing the Meuse river was achievable and on its left bank he placed a vast majority of the victory point areas. In order to win, Germans need to push a bit -- but not too much! -- further as they did 70 years ago. 100