Against the Odds Annual 2021 - Operation Roundup

Operation Roundup was the code name for a plan prepared by Allied forces to invade Northern France in 1943 in the Pas de Calais area. This two-player game explores the first month of this never-run plan, set in September 1943 (instead of the historical landings at Salerno in Italy).

Allied forces are not the mighty invasion armada of 1944 lacking both the armored "funnies" and Mulberries that worked so well in Normandy. For the Germans at this time their "Atlantic Wall" and panzer arm are more promises of what is to come than actual impenetrable defenses.

Yet the game remains highly re-playable time after time as, at start, neither player knows Hitler’s reaction to the invasion until it is rolled for during the first turn of the game. Will he give orders to:

• Strip the East of as many divisions as possible transferring them to this new front so as to attempt to annihilate the landing, or merely try to contain it as a “self-sustaining POW camp”?

• Redeploy the as-yet-unbroken Reich Air Defense fighter force to temporarily give up the war against the Allied strategic bombing campaign and switch to combat air support over the battlefield?

• Mobilize the II Parachute Corps (standing by at air bases in southern France) to drop directly into the Allied beachhead? Depending on how many of them survive, they might prove decisive in upsetting the whole Allied plan. Or trigger powerful Allied countermeasures?

The map area covers the French coast from around Dunkirk south to the mouth of the Somme and inland to Lille and Arras. Operation Roundup uses a standard 34" x 22” large-hex (19mm) map and 216 medium (16mm) counters. The game is scaled at 2 miles (3.25 km) per hex, with 10 three-day game turns, and uses regiments and brigades (and a few battalions) as units of maneuver. The game system is an evolution of the classic old-SPI Cobra, simple enough to allow for a game to be completed in one sitting, and can also easily be adapted for solitaire play.

Bonus Game Inside! In August, 1944, Soviet reconnaissance planes overflew Hitler's eastern headquarters complex at Rastenburg. They dropped leaflets with lists of names of German personnel working there, urging them to defect now, or be held accountable. What if they had instead dropped...something more substantial? Keeping with our theme of making the 2021 Annual our "What If?" issue, also inside this release is a second game, A Cornered Wolf, that explores a hypothetical assault on Hitler's "Wolfsschanze" HQ by Soviet airborne forces.

There's also an expansion kit inside for Arctic Disaster (in ATO #47) called Immer Voran! on the Battle of North Cape in December 1943. This operation, spearheaded by the German Battlecruiser Scharnhorst, was the last large scale attempt by the German navy to intercept and destroy Allied convoys to and from the Soviet Union.