Get it? It’s the last few turns and I’m freeing Europe?

Am I showing my age with that joke?

Anyway, that keyboard riff is going to be going through my head this WHOLE TIME, so I blame that for any errors in judgement I make for these last three turns.

THREE TURNS.

I had the absolute minimum amount of Victory Points to continue on to the second half of the game, and now I’m trying to get 40, the absolute minimum to call the game a win. 20 is the absolute minimum to not call yourself an abysmal failure.

DO YOU HEAR THAT MOM, THAT’S WHAT YOU NEED!

Woo, where did THAT come from?

Let’s get to the game, shall we? Please?

I’m not sure why the “Save Map” feature has the HQ Ranges on, but not the Engineering Ranges, but here you go, that’s what the map looks like at its fullest. Neato, huh? That’s a lot of chit right there. Er, chits.

Luckily no new ones are added for Landing Checks or anything silly like that, so let’s draw our Event and get a move on. Take a Naval Fire Token. I should just use that damn thing.

Now German Fire, there’s really only one thing that would really cramp my style, and that would be Red firing on the East Sector. Which is EXACTLY what happened. Oh, huh, a Purple Ambush in the West Sector did some stuff that’ll be…crampy, too:

So G/2/16 loses a Step and THREE Units are Disrupted in the West Sector. The one deep in the South there is an Issue as I was going to have them continue further south with L/3/115 behind them to get 4 total VP hexes together. That shoots that plan in the foot.

Huh. Ain’t that nice! There’s only one 1 step Infantry Unit to choose, so that made it easy. That’s a big deal because now they can Command adjacent hexes, allowing them to hold more than one VP site possibly.

Of course, they were one of the Units hit by Ambushes this turn.

HQs and Engineers get bigger, which you’ll see as I do my Actions, and speaking of Actions:

First time I’m using the Artillery of a 9-U unit (62AFA that’s under the 1/A/741 Tank) to support the Attack on the Red Reinforcement. Felt good. Think this is how 90% of how the Units will look at the end of the game, really, I’m sitting on a lot of the VP spaces so far. Not going to get many off board, unfortunately.

Similar here, lots of movement just to get Units next to VP spaces. Most already in position, if not there. Also trying to get as much as I can out Exit G.

But that’s it. That’s Turn 30. That went by quickly, didn’t it?

Turn 31 will be quick, too, as absolutely nothing happens…I mean, all the Germans unDistrupt. But that’s it, really. I FINALLY get to have my tanks use their 4 hexes of movement on a road, so that’s fun. So that’s something. But it’s just setting up for endgame.

I’m effectively holding Normandy upside-down and shaking it, hoping any spare VP will fall out of its pockets. (Oops, forgot to draw the attack on the Brown Reinforcement on there in the middle. You can be assured I blew it up)

Turn 32 is much the same. Moving to take VP spaces, and getting the last unit off the map that I could. I almost got a Unit off exit C far South, but I wouldn’t have US Communication at Exit C, so it wouldn’t count (though I was one hex off of being able to do that), which denies me 3 points. Drat. It’s those little things that I’m one hex off that’s going to kill me, so let’s get that last picture of the map, and I’ll show what points I got.

A byoot.

Let’s just go down the list. One VP for each German reinforcement position you control in a hex on or adjacent to a major road, or a minor road leading off the south edge of the map. Luckily all 42 of these are marked on the map with a “VP” on them, because DANG. Let’s see what I have.

That’s 38 of the 42! DANG! Just the group on the far left there did I miss. And we all know what a quagmire that Eastern flank was, so that’s easy to notice.

4VP for each Draw that’s open. It’s open if you control every hex and it’s completely clear of Obstacles (the engineers have complete access to all hexes). Since HQ and Engineers can extend control, we’ve got that on all 4 in spades. So 4×4 is 16. Boom.

1 VP for each non-infantry, non-HQ unit on the high ground.

That’s 2 tanks on the left there, for 10 total units.

1 VP for each armor or regular infantry STEP that moves off the map from a lettered exit hex, but only if you can Trace US Communication blah, blah blah. I only did that from exit G and I have Communication from the HQ over there no problem. I only exited 5 steps though, but still, nothing to sneeze at.

1VP for each ranger infantry that exits from the south. Never did that. Never tried. Should have. 0.

SUBTRACT 1 for each WN you don’t control. 0

SUBTRACT for each German unit in the Kampfgruppe Meyer box – 8.

So 38 + 16 + 10 + 5 – 8=

61

Decisive US victory.

HO

LE

Crap.

I must have done something TOTALLY wrong. There is NO WAY I got the highest scoring possibility. Mind you, I just eeked over by 1 point, but good grief.

Maybe I got really, really lucky, as I felt like the German forces were pulling a TON of “no action” results during the German Fire Phases during the section section of the game, or getting “Remove Depth Marker” results when that didn’t do anything, etc. Also, all of their Reinforcements were down really, really early…which felt off to me, but I can’t see anywhere in the rules about reshuffling them, and I looked…a LOT.

But you know what?

I had fun playing.

And that, I guess, can let me pontificate on my philosophy of gaming.

We game to have fun.

Games are for PLAY. Sure, you can take play seriously, but play is play. And if you don’t follow rules, you might as well just go out back and play Calvinball and do whatever the heck you feel like. But if I spent every waking moment fretting over getting everything “right” rather than just playing, then I wouldn’t have been enjoying myself, and if I wasn’t enjoying myself, I wouldn’t be playing (in my opinion).

So I call that a win, at 61 points, or at 19 points.

This whole blog started out with High Frontier, a game with a LOT of rules. And even with that big ol’ game that I’ve played a lot (a freaking lot), there was one or two rules that someone in the comments pointed out to me. They weren’t game breaking, but it was something. What you didn’t see was the years….literal YEARS of starting and restarting games of that and failing and failing again to get games off the ground (heh) while I tried to get the rules down. Yet most of the time, I had fun anyway. I knew I was screwing up, I knew whatever my final scores were ended up being wrong, but I got a little be closer each time and still had fun anyway.

And, of course, by the time I got the rules down they just changed editions anyway, but I digress.

So what you’re seeing with all these later posts is the trying and failing I’m going through. I’m playing these games, and I’m having a great time….but damn if I’m not failing a lot.

So odds are when this post finally sees the light of day and I show it on BoardgameGeek, I’m going to get several people to point out how much I messed it up, and I’ll learn from that. And I’ll do better next time. And I’ll feel bad that some of you might be following along to learn how to play, and I’ll have failed you if you were using this as a tutorial.

But hey, if nothing else, this will count as one of your failures. A step on your path to playing it correctly. And maybe, just maybe, you won’t feel bad if you play a game for hours and hours and end up with a weird score at the end. Maybe you’ll just say “Hey, I had fun anyway.” You’ll flip the the rulebook the next time you sit down, facepalm when you see whatever you missed and go at it again.

(Watch, in some fluke I happened to play a perfect game and I’m putting all this crap out here for nothing. HA!)

Oh well, at the very least I hope you at least had some fun reading of my exploits on the beaches of Normandy. Maybe you learned a thing or two. Maybe you know what to watch out for when you play. Maybe you know which parts of the rulebook to focus on, and which not to bother. Maybe you know never to trust this blog again.

All I know is this has been several months of working on, so I can take a bit of a break now while I think about what to do next. I think it’ll be something I’m a bit more familiar with, and maybe something a bit easier and a bit shorter. ’cause I’m tired. That was a bit much.

Here’s my obligatory shout out to my ko-fi page. No big deal. Just a nice way to say you liked what you saw and appreciate my work. It’s okay if you didn’t, or if you don’t have the spare change.

I’ll end here as I began. Thanking everyone for reading, and being thankful that I never had to be in the situation that I just depicted in boardgame form. It is an amazing turn of events that I am here at all, and it’s helpful to have that perspective every now and again. Take a step back from the every day and just look at yourself and think “Wow.” Whether it’s the fact that these men had to run up a beach filled with machine gun fire to save the world for Democracy, or even the huge existential fact that we wouldn’t exist if a star hadn’t exploded millions of years ago. Just wow.

Thanks again.