We also wanted to break away from the infantrymen-slogging-across-the-beach stereotype personified in movies and games about the Omaha landings. Yes, the infantry spent plenty of time slogging across this beach, and plenty more cowering behind the seawall, wondering if they had been abandoned to die. But as Americans have always done, they hitched up their suspenders and got to work. Working alongside them were the Shermans of the 743rd Tank Battalion. And that’s what we wanted to show.

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We wanted a game with combined arms – Sherman tanks, Rangers, work-a-day grunts, German 88’s, and the unexpected appearance of German armor or a lone Messerschmitt strafing the gray-sand beach. And we think we have it. Omaha: The Battle for the Beach, is not a static encounter, but rather a fluid battle of phases. The Americans struggle mightily in the early going, the German guns wrecking havoc as the Yanks cross the beach. But The Shermans’ guns, destroyer’s shells, and Allied airpower punch holes in the German’s defenses, and slowly the Allies will advance up Les Moulins and Vierville draw.

Depending on the luck of the Action Card draw, a sharp battle between an anti-tank company of the German 352nd Infantry Division, and the American Shermans pushing through Les Moulins or Vierville may develop. Of course this isn’t Kursk; the farmland behind Omaha Beach would soon flow into the bocage that kept the Allies pinned for the better part of two months. We devised numerous schemes to depict the challenge tankers (and infantrymen) faced when fighting in this terrain. Some were clever, some weren’t, but they were all semi-rules intensive. So we settled on what we thought was the cleverest solution of all: you can’t shoot through more than two hexes of farmland. After all the object of a game is to play it, not waste your time learning complex rules. So, the battle between the Shermans and StuGs is more like a knife-fight than a long-range tank duel.

More often than not, the game’s third and final phase is the battle for Chateau de Vaumicel. It is here that the German troops of the 2/916th and the remaining StuGs of the 352nd’s anti-tank battalion usually chose to make a stand. What’s so important about the Chateau? Actually nothing, but it marks the deepest penetration behind Omaha Beach on D-Day. Hence, we thought it should be a victory location.

Inside the Game
It’s difficult to assign objective values to such an unobjective endeavor as war, but it needs doing if we are simulating a conflict. Some designers spend days pouring over data, others take a somewhat different approach. We fall under the latter category. We factor information about the weapons employed, the discipline of the troops using them, and our own perceptions of the conflict. Doing so led us to the following conclusions.

An American infantry platoon had more firepower than its German counterpart. True, German squads possessed the MG-42 – a machinegun on which we based our M-60, but the typical Wehrmacht rifleman lugged around the Kar 98K, bolt-action rifle. So, while the German labored over his rifle’s bolt action, his American counterpart squeezed off an 8-round clip from his M-1 Garand. It was no contest.

Accordingly we gave American platoons more firepower, but a shorter range. We figure you don’t want to tangle with the M-1 at a couple of hundred yards, but that the MG-42 would dominate a firefight at the longer ranges. Hence, the American rifle squad outguns it’s opponent 6-4 at two hexes, but is outgunned itself (4-3) at three or four hexes. The Rangers and paratroops posses more firepower than a rifle squad for different reasons. The Rangers were renowned for their marksmanship, hence the HE firepower of eight. The paratroopers had a ton of automatic weapons, such as the Grease Gun and Thompson Sub-machinegun, so we figured they could dish out some serious lead albeit at short range.

For the armor, we used the Sherman as our baseline value, and spun the other guns and armor piercing factors off it. Both the German’s 75mm AT gun and the StuG had a long-barreled version of the 75mm gun. It was a gun capable of flinging its shell further and harder than the Shermans’ short-barreled 75mm – but not radically further or harder. Accordingly, we bumped up both values a smidgen on the German weapons. That brings us to the 88mm. In reality a feared gun, and one that has reached almost mythical proportions among war gamers. It had to be able to reach out and touch some one from quite a distance, and touch them hard. We think it does that nicely.

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