FAAA – onside report by Jur

This starts with setting yourself up for a game in two months, having to start it from scratch. I had a list of 5 books I needed to get through to base the game on. So it was all a bit rushed and I could only decide pretty late into the reading stage what game I really was going to design.

The challenge of airborne operations in between D-Day and Market Garden are myriad and you could design several games out of that if you want to. As my personal interest is in finding out why several choices in the air plan for OMG were different than in previous plans, I wanted the game to focus on the making of plans over the course of the 6 weeks from the creation of First Allied Airborne Army and OMG.

I narrowed the options down to a game on leading FAAA through its first weeks, rather than planning one operation because I thought that the audience wouldn’t be hardcore military historians and that some would prefer personal goals and rivalries rather than nitty gritty planning.

Jaap starred as Lewis Brereton, Sophie as Boy Browning, Natan as chief of plan general Cutler, Nick L as general Walch, chief of staff British airborne and Jim as general Williams in charge of the transport aircraft.

Given the amount of information provided (too much) the players got stuck into the detail of planning, and I decided to roll with that. First lesson learned 10 minutes into the game! So while I was originally thinking we might do 4 or 5 turns (weeks) of 15 minutes, effectively after 1.5 hours we were in the second week of August.

Two ways I wanted to drive the game forward was by Brereton’s and Browning’s contacts with Eisenhower and various big boys in Washington on one end and Montgomery at the other. The former would demand bold and daring plans to use FAAA as a strategic asset, latter would have concrete plans in conjunction with British and Canadian armies. Next to that would be Bradley, who wanted to use the transport aircraft for oil deliveries to frontline ground troops instead of airborne operations. These diverging priorities would and did put Jaap in a twist.

And given a lot of detail, the players got in to planning with gusto. They picked up the concept of the historical TRANSFIGURE plan, an attempt to use two and a half airborne divisions to cut of the German army west of the Seine. They didn’t get to the point where they would discuss various options in the air plan: day/night landing, single/double tow, one or two lifts on a day, coup de main actions.

Quite a few concepts of other plans were also discussed: A drop near Antwerp to open the harbour (historically known as INFATUATE), or around the port of Rotterdam. And to a frantic remark by Jaap: ‘if this is not daring and bold enough for them, what do they want? A drop on Berlin?’ my reply had to be ‘yes’, FAAA indeed considered a plan (TALISMAN) early September 1944 to occupy the airports for Berlin in case German resistance collapsed. But the expected level of boldness is that in August / early September FAAA also came up with plans for breaching the Siegfried Line in 3 places, as well as crossing the Rhine in 3 places.

The rushed design meant I arrived with a game with rough edges and, in hindsight, not choosing between two games: a reasonably detailed planning game of one operation and a higher level game of managing resources for a series of operations. Thanks to the players and their constructive reactions post-game I came out of it energised to alter the design into two separate designs and run one or both later this year.

Other useful things I picked up:

• Although I provided a number of maps, it was better that Jim put them in a conceptboard which made them more accessible and helped them to work in a share space.
• Planning might be simplified and abstracted by using cards.