If you’ve played wargames for more than a year or two, then at some time you’ve probably suffered from the “Just One More Turn” Syndrome.
You know how it works: A compelling situation on the table, an interesting narrative unfolding or a major decision point at hand turns what was a good game into an acute addiction that you suddenly can’t force yourself to put aside for the night – at least not until you realize that it’s 1 a.m. and your alarm clock will sound at 0630 no matter what happens in the game.
In several playings (so far) of D-Day at Omaha Beach I’ve suffered two episodes of JOMTS. Each time, ‘one more turn’ has stretched into several before my drooping eyelids have reminded me that I’ve got to be at work the next morning.
After 16 turns, the action shifts inland.
I blame the game’s interesting approach to the beach landings for this little problem. Once I get a few US units moving in the right direction and laying down attacks on the beach’s defensive positions I have the uncontrollable urge to see those little gray counters (the German units) vanish from the map before I can call it a night.
Clearly, it’s been quite some time since I’ve played a solitaire game so compelling. All of the various game elements – rules, physical systems, play sequence – are so well integrated that my decisions and the game ‘actions’ flow together to create a game narrative that unfolds easily without the need for constant reference to charts, tables or paragraphs of dense type. The ratio of play-to-reference time in the basic game (the first 16 turns) is outstanding.
Dutch Cota finally gets his boys moving.
D-Day at Omaha Beach is completely ‘diceless’ and uses a deterministic, matrix-based mechanism for combat resolution. Even so it manages to avoid many of the replayability issues that have bedeviled previous solitaire games.
Through several playings of the introductory and landing scenarios, I’ve not seen any game’s narrative unfold the same as any other. There are, to be sure, a few common ‘threads’. Early activity on the beach, for example, tends to concentrate on the eastern ends of the landing zones because the landing table results lean heavily toward the historical (eastward) drift patterns.
On top of that, when the action shifts ‘beyond the beach’ into the second half of the game – the player faces an entirely different set of problems. In fact, I’ve discovered that there’s quite a bit of difference in what I want to accomplish during the landing phase (first 16 turns), depending on whether I’m playing just the landing scenario or the full, 32-turn scenario.
Set to clobber pesky German reinforcements.
In the short scenario, there’s plenty of incentive to use your scarce leaders to drive inland with whatever they can gather around to capture or control VP positions. That’s still a temptation in the ‘long’ game if I’ve got a shot at the elusive ‘instant’ victory (collecting 25 VP by the end of turn 16) – but if I don’t reach 25 VP and all of my leaders are inland, then the masses of reinforcements that land beginning on turn 16 will take a long time to get off the beach and into the action.
Each division has limited leadership. One ‘general’ (the deputy division commanders) and one headquarters for each RCT. Once the battle starts to move inland, that makes for some very difficult US decisions.
Great stuff.
