Postcard Remagen, 7 March 1945 (2024)

Postcard Remagen, 7 March 1945 is a tense, mutually frustrating little game about First US Army attempting - historically successfully, of course - to be the first to fight across the Rhine River into Germany in March 1945. 9 US Army pieces - from one of the first M-26 Pershing platoons up to 78th Infantry Division regiments - urgently and desperately trying to get the Ludendorff Bridge - intact. Our Ardennes/Bulge survivor (barely) 9th Armored Division gets payback! :-) ? :-/ 15 German pieces, including fleeing refugees and military units (including the platoon of a "top secret" SAM (surface-to-air-missile) weapon) as well as the engineer company trying to destroy the Bridge after enough military units and refugees get across ... despite maddening chain-of-command and technical demolition difficulties and delays. Refugees in the way clogging the road/approaches, and fleeing German military units safely across the Bridge may suddenly up and desert and disappear! instead of helping to hold the northern end (as the remnant of an elite parachute battalion did!, historically). Sudden death ... of the Bridge ... can end the game. Or if we get across, depleted German panzer divisions (including local commander Fritz Bayerlein's Panzer Lehr) can try to push the Allies back - maybe even to get back to the northern end of the bridge to try to blow it again. Included are my Pressed Attack and Desperate/No Retreat! rules, and in its very first (solitaire) playtest game, our 27th Armored Infantry Battalion's attack 2:1 attack across the Bridge ended in only a Disruption of the German engineer/Pioneer company, enabling it to then (at 1:2 odds) blow the Bridge (in our faces) at the start of the next turn. The fleeing German units west of the Rhine are hidden even to the German player - CHAOS! - although he gets to peek at 2 of them every turn after the first. Disrupted German military units stay so and stay visible, unless they are not re-Disrupted in the next US combat phase. —description from the designer