Postcard Wargaming - "Battle Card: Market Garden"

A free print & play game for very short breaks.

The Background

Operation Market Garden is probably one of the most famous operations of WW2. The Allied forces took devastating losses and ultimately failed in their main objective of opening up an invasion route straight to Germany.

I highly recommend that you watch the movie A Bridge Too Far to get a better understanding of the conditions on the ground. Episode 4 of Band of Brothers shows another perspective but that's a series you should be watching regardless. Just thinking about it makes me want to do my yearly rewatch of that masterpiece.

Source: Article from Ken Camel

The Game

Being such a tiny game, Battle Card: Market Garden has to simplify a lot of things. The mechanics are extremely basic and the strategic choices barely exist. Without the historical context, it would barely be worth a second look. That being said, it actually manages to simulate the desperate push to Arnhem relatively well.

Setup (Before Airdrop)

Instead of folding it into a postcard and using the provided tokens, I simply used a couple of colored blocks and printed it on an A4 page. This is my preferred method when it comes to print & play games because it gives me a chance to see if I like the game before I spend the time and materials to craft the actual game components.

A full game can be completed in a couple of minutes. I recommend playing a couple of games back-to-back to make it worth your time. The combat resolution table looked a bit confusing at first but that's mostly because years of gaming have programmed me to see the color red as the enemy. Controlling the Allied forces as the color red just felt wrong somehow.

Last Turn Victory

It's a simple dice game so expect merciless randomness all the way through. To me, it felt like most of my games came down to the fight around Arnhem (last stop at the top). Having a -2 Airdrop at the start of the game and a very late reinforcement roll can make life very difficult for you. It doesn't matter if you steamroll the first two battles because you can't advance the "30 Corps" token unless you already control the area.

The 6 turns are very tight and every roll feels like it could win or lose you the game. Obvious game-determining randomness would be a major negative for longer games but it becomes irrelevant for 5 minute games like Battle Card: Market Garden.

Conclusion

It's free. Your enjoyment will entirely depend on your interest of the historical context and researching these events will probably be more enjoyable than playing the game itself. I'm always looking for excuses to dive deeper into specific historical events and this game is serving that exact purpose.

Apparently there has been a successful Kickstarter to expand the concept for Battle Card: Series 1. I haven't done any further research on that project but it might be worth a look.