Clash of the Ardennes Review: Unusual Presentation of a Tired Topic

In the genre of historical wargames, one of the most...

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Alright, so, I haven't finished reading your review yet. It looks good.

But putting those photographs sideways instead of upright on St. Patrick's Day is borderline cruel. I damn near threw up my 2-2-2 Irish breakfast (2 eggs, 2 toast, 2 shots) from the vertigo. Please consider the gastric well-being of your audience in future postings.

Now back to the article.

So it's an abstract with a WW2 coat of paint to maintain some semblance of popular appeal.

And they list 39 (!) different "preview"/"first impression" links, and I have not heard of a single one of them. Nice to see the preview-industrial complex of setting up your own "game review" brand in exchange for free games & publicity is alive & well in some corners of the globe.

Sagrilarus wrote: But putting those photographs sideways instead of upright on St. Patrick's Day is borderline cruel. I damn near threw up my 2-2-2 Irish breakfast (2 eggs, 2 toast, 2 shots) from the vertigo. Please consider your audience in future postings.

Sorry. Didn't even consider that when I was adding them, but after looking at them again, you're right.

Granted, I carry some wargame baggage coming into this review. But when I saw the image on the TWBG front page and "Arden" truncated at the end of the title my first thought was "jeeze, another one." But that's the nature of wargaming, dominated by three settings -- Bulge, Market Garden, and "Eastfront" (the last so overused that the industry has removed the middle syllable to save man hours.) Oddly enough the mechanics in the game you're describing sound better suited to Market Garden, but let's just leave it at that before anyone gets any ideas.

Wargames need unpredictability, because "no plan survives contact with the enemy" is the nature of the business. So as I continued to read your review it became more and more clear that this package doesn't stand as a unified package. If you're going to use setting it needs to fit. Tanks do not defeat infantry. It's more complicated than that and anyone with any interest in this setting is going to grit their teeth a bit. That is, the game deselects its target audience. The result is that the wrong people pick up the box and no one is happy. At no point in the design process was there a sanity check that identified this fundamental disconnect. It makes me wonder why the publisher didn't identify this problem and let the designer know during development or testing. (And yes, that's a straight line.)

Oddly enough, I think a setting in war production, i.e., the arms race in the air or across all of operations might have been a better fit for a Rock/Paper/Scissors sort of mechanic and lifted the game away from its dependence on a 1970s romantic view of the war. But that wouldn't solve the fundamental problems you identify in the gameplay, the back and forth slog that doesn't make for good gaming. When there is no unusual die roll to break things open, to change up the mix, slogs remain slogs, not entertainment.

There's a reason luck has been part of this industry for fifty years.

Well written review. I liked this one.

Thanks! That point about tanks automatically defeating infantry occurred to me, too, when first reading the rules. My first thought was: "You know that tanks were usually supported by infantry because of their vulnerability, right...?" But I'm betting that the designer was approaching this from a small engagement perspective, like in the town battle scene in Saving Private Ryan, where the approach of the Tiger is daunting for all Americans involved. That's why you're fighting over "streets", rather than hillsides or proper strategic objectives. But it was also something of a sidestep to make the system work. After all, said infantry are the ones placing those anti-tank mines, which is also kind of a deviation, given the static nature of mines and the more mobile nature of infantry and tanks and the original engagement, overall. Like FCM said, I think it was an abstract idea that had the theme slipped on in order to generate interest from an audience that is still ready to press the pledge button for anything WW2-related. I probably should've poked at the thematic issues a bit more, but I had already half-dismissed all of that because it was a WW2 game.