MMP, Standard Combat Series · Series Designer: Dean Essig Module Designer: Alan R Wambold · 2nd Reprint, 2026· Campaign game, 13 of 15 turns · Played solo
The three points for the TL:DR crew
Verdict
A clean, fast, low-friction treatment of 10–15 May 1940 that gets the fighting right and leaves out the aspect that actually ended it. I enjoyed playing it, but I finished it puzzled; what was happening on the board would not reconcile with what I understood to have happened historically. It left me wanting another go at it after I did some more reading.
My departure: the usual complaint about this game is that the Dutch are too strong. They aren’t. The Dutch were not really beaten in the field if we read some more detailed history. There is no doubt they would have been as 9th Panzer and the rest rolled in and got after it. But fact remains they were ordered to stop, when the Germans started bombing Rotterdam. Talk about a premonition for the Battle of Britian.
What the game is missing is not a Dutch nerf, it’s a political end-point construct. That I think is what tweaked me, the sheer volume of Dutch forces in this part of the theater, doing what amounts to a solid job and in Den Haag- overwhelming the Germans.
Perspective
I came in with the same historical preconception most people have: the Germans rolled in, rolled over the Dutch, and it was over in days. That is not what the history actually tells us, and it is not what the game does. This was my first pass at the title, solo, both sides, played hard from both ends with no quarter given.
I had already talked about the game at turn 12 of 15 in the play video, withother updates as well feel free to see all those on my YT channel. This is the considered version after the reading to resolve my confusion.
Role & Scale
Counters run from platoon up to battalion, but the working scale is companies. All the Luftlande units are company-sized; the Dutch are mostly companies too, and there are a great many of them with high combat factors.
You are therefore thinking at regimental level, or across a handful regiments. Yet dealing with each company piecemeal, cobbling a handful of companies together to go and hit a company-sized objective.
Where the scale strains: platoon-sized units [the paratroopers] double their combat factors on an overrun, which makes them powerful and extremely fragile with just one step, on a very deadly CRT. And there is no visible quality differentiation for the Dutch border troops beyond raw factors. A border-guard unit is a one-step 3-6; a strong Luftlande company is an 8, flipping to 4. If that 3-6 is the quality modelling, it’s doing it with numbers alone.
Core Tension
Everything in this game seems to orbits two things:
Air is the biggest factor of the two.
Intelligence
Nothing hidden. This is an open-board game; the friction is in force, terrain and timing, not in what you know.
Objectives
Fifteen turns, and VPs distributed across bridges, road hexes and the airfields and to a limited extent losses. I ended with a German minor victory. I was solidly in major-victory territory until Ypenburg fell, which cost 8 VP and dropped it back to a minor.
The odd thing or problem: I don’t see viable paths to a German victory at all. And I wonder if that’s the designer’s point ? That the Dutch could have held out if they had been willing to absorb the bombing of their cities. That’s a plausible notion, not a fact. Something to look into, your mileage may vary.
Sequence & Movement
Standard SCS turn structure – Move/Barrage/Combat/Exploit. Tweaked for the Air aspects to be:
In the German turn- air availability → air attacks → seaplanes, para drops and air landings → AA fires at the incoming air → move → barrage → combat → exploit → supply → remove DG markers. Dutch turn is broadly the same, plus some special rules for the naval units.
The game is somewhat interactive and the turns play quickly. Early on there aren’t many choices as the German you attack everywhere, to secure a airfield and supply source by turn 3.; as the Dutch you jam yourself into the white hexes and hold on until reinforcements arrive, then build enough weight to surround or engulf and counterattack.
One decision that paid off: I put most of my air into the first two turns knocking out AA. It made the rest of the game faster and much easier for ther Germans brining in 22nd LL. AA units fire in the air phase and are then available again later in the turn, so killing them on the ground is worth doing early.
Conflict Resolution
Terrain is the whole enchilada. Combat factor is multiplied by four in the white major-city hexes and by three in town hexes, with smaller multipliers elsewhere.
Do the math and you see the game: two 8-strength units in a city hex is 16 × 4. A single 6-factor Dutch company in the Hague is 24 defensive factors, and with only a handful of thinned German stacks in that sector you’re looking at 1-1 at best, more likely 1-2. Take a 1-2 out of desperation and you eat an A1 — attacker loses a step, defender probably doesn’t. That is not a viable line of play.
So the game makes you do the maths before you commit, A 3 combat factor {cf} becomes 12 in a city hex; multiple 8-factor unitsor a doubled overrunner is what you need to make it tenable combat. Terrain, air, and the Dutch reinforcement cadence are the important three levers. The dutch special ability with arty was not really effectively used by me. Nor did I bother too much with some of the other very minor special rules, for the Gold and Politicians/Royalty escape. I could see pretty early there was no way that the Germans were going to get into Den Haag in force.
The CRT is deadly did I mention that already 😊 . Pretty much everyone loses a step or retreats. Across most of the game I was killing four Dutch steps for every one I lost, and after the 9th Panzer+ arrived it went to eight or ten to one, with the odd turn where the Dutch pulled it back to 3-2 or 2-1. Never once did the Dutch kill more steps than the Germans in a turn and yet they still had the run of the map, from a control perspective, with units flooding in all the way thru. One odd side bar. The Brits arrive Turn 12 I trhink. They are stuck to withing 3 hexes of a map corner entry point. Where NO action will take place. A waste of time punching, clipping and place.
The air availability spread is too wide. You can draw anything from one Stuka to six, plus the Heinkels and the Ju 88s. That is just too much swing for a game where you are the one on the offensive. It set the cadence of the entire campaign: on a bad air turn the Dutch don’t lose steps, stay organised, coalesce, and counterattack vigorously. On a good one they don’t. That single roll does more to decide the game than any decision I made. So if you rolled poorly turn 1,2,3. You may as well reset. So if this was the element to foster replay-ability, it ended up being more annoying than anything.
Logistics / Supply
The Ju 52 pool is the real logistics system, and it’s one of the elegant abstractions. You start with 72 transport points for the campaign. Landing reinforcements or dropping a supply node means rolling against the wreck markers on the airfields this is the mud and the standing water made mechanical. Landings can scatter and they will, creating a mess for the Germans.
I finished having lost 24 of 72, about 48 left. And those losses cost you steps of arriving reinforcements, which is exactly what happened historically.
The caveat: I don’t think the Ju-52 tables reproduce the historical loss rate. The real operation lost far more aircraft than my rolls did. Directionally right, quantitatively light. But then again I did hammer the AA hard or atleast suppress it via DG’s the entire game.
Artillery is well represented including standing barrages that shell a hex across the turn and cause the Germans real problems.
Historical Narrative
This is where the game earns its keep, and it needs defending against an objection that turns out to be misplaced.
The obvious complaint is that the Dutch stay in the fight far longer than they did historically the campaign lasted five days, 10 to 14 May 1940. But the history doesn’t support the complaint.
The Dutch were by the 14th not beaten in the field. Overall in country they were outnumbered close to three to one: 280,000 men in 9 divisions against 750,000 in 22 . Made up of one tank, five tankettes and 32 armoured cars against 759 German tanks. And the casualties in this portion of the conflict were almost level: 2,332 Dutch against 2,032 Germans.
Locally my own books give roughly 80,000 Dutch troops in this area for the fight that will be a different denominator (field army in the western sector vs. total mobilised). What else I found: 48 regiments, 22 border battalions, a great deal of artillery, and 155 aircraft of which 74 were biplanes and most of that air force gone inside a day and a half, which is exactly why the game’s air-availability swing matters. The toher key factor here is 9th Panzer was under strength, and X Corp took its sweet time entering the map to relieve the FJ and LL formations historically and here too.
The German plan went wrong repeatedly:
What ended the campaign was not the battle. Rotterdam was bombed on the night of 14 May, the Germans threatened the same for other cities, and the political leadership knowing it could not stop the bombers agreed to a cease fire and end of hostilities. The field army was still fighting when it was told to stop.
So a game that keeps the Dutch going is not modelling them too strong per se. It is modelling the military situation correctly. What it is missing is the thing that actually ended the campaign: a decision taken above the battlefield, I suppose some smart Clauswitizian comment here about Politics by other means .
No such mechanism. There is no forced political end-point you fight as long as you can and see whether the Germans can force a result before turn 15 runs out. Which is why you end up with hundreds of companies of powerful Dutch units stacked four high, roaming freely and beating up your lifters. Historically they were disarmed by a decision, not by combat. In the game, nothing takes them off the board but you. As the images show there were boatloads of ‘combat ineffective’ dead units by game end.
So while it felt off… lets give the design credit for getting the fighting right. In my run the German narrative arc was right too most of the Fallschirmjäger were torn up, or eliminated, about a quarter maybe more of the 22nd Luftlande gone, a heavy price paid. We end up with an ahistorical result, but just cannot be historical with the political abstraction element. It might be interesting to have a ‘surrender table scaling to the 14th of May, and beyond. To add some tension, while allowing the German reinforcement arrival of the Panzers more variability?
But is there not more to it?
We know other actions were taking place and that events outside the scope of teh game had an impact.
I popped into AI mode and dug around here is what it had to say:
The Dutch defence was built around relief that never came. Under Gamelin’s Breda variant, Giraud’s French Seventh Army containing some of the most mobile divisions in the French army was to advance up the coast, link with the Dutch and secure the Scheldt estuary. And here’s the part that matters for your review: the thing that killed it is on your map. The German airborne seizure of the Moerdijk causeway cut Holland in two and drove the Dutch army north toward Amsterdam and Rotterdam, away from the French. With the junction impossible, Giraud was ordered to abandon Breda and redeploy south to Antwerp. 9th Panzer reached the Moerdijk bridges late on 12 May, the balance crossed the next day, and on 14 May Student shook hands with von Hubicki.
So the bombing supplied the reason to stop. The failed Breda variant supplied the reason there was no point continuing.
This makes your design argument bigger, not different. The game contains the cause and omits the consequence. Moerdijk is worth VPs here; historically it was worth the campaign, because taking it severed the relief scheme and stranded a field army that could still fight. That’s also a real answer to your “I can’t find a German path to victory” — the Germans didn’t win this on the terms the game scores.
And there was a second reason, off the map entirely. The Dutch plan assumed relief from the south. Giraud’s French Seventh Army was to come up the coast, link with the Dutch and secure the Scheldt estuary the “Breda variant.” Its lead elements got as far as Breda and never made the junction, because the airborne seizure of the Moerdijk causeway had cut Holland in two and pushed the Dutch army north, away from them. Giraud was ordered to abandon the plan and redeploy toward Antwerp. 9th Panzer reached the Moerdijk bridges late on 12 May; on the 14th Student was shaking hands with von Hubicki.
So by the time Rotterdam burned, the Dutch had already lost the thing their whole defence was built around — someone coming to get them. The bombing gave them the reason to stop. Breda gave them the reason there was no point going on.
Which makes the gap larger than I first put it. This game contains the cause and leaves out the consequence. Moerdijk is worth victory points on the map. Historically it was worth the campaign. // END AI insert
Sources: Dutch and German totals and casualties : Wikipedia, German invasion of the Netherlands (tertiary, corroborated in part). Airborne detail and the Grebbe Line — David Wm. Meyler, “Falling Eagles: The German Airborne Corps in Action,” S&T 121, pp.49–52. Force context — The Second World War: Ambitions to Nemesis p.77 (250,000 Dutch). Army Group B composition, Command 42 p.53, p.58. The Fall of France (Oxford University Press) pp. 47, 52, 56 — the Breda variant, Giraud’s composition, and the abandonment; Martin Marix Evans, The Fall of France: Act with Daring (Osprey) p. 19 — the 9th Panzer timeline and the Moerdijk link-up. Both read in session, and they corroborate each other.
Friction vs. Reward
Friction is low and that is the hallmark of SCS. Eight to ten pages of series rules and you’re playing. Turns move. There is very little bookkeeping.
Where I stuck is whether the reward earns even that much. I enjoyed playing it. But the board kept telling me a story my reading of the history wouldn’t confirm, and that dulled the enthusiasm until the homework showed the board was closer to right than my preconception was.
What redeems it: despite the masses of Dutch units alive on the map and dead beside it, the game left me asking could I have done that differently, and what would I try next time? A game that makes you want another run has done the main job.
Audience Fit & Comparators
For: anyone with an interest in WWII who wants a simpler game without much friction and specifically people who want to take multiple bites at the cherry and work out how to eke out a German win without the political layer of the real thing.
Skip it if: you expect the German win to be a layup, or you want historical fidelity and detail. This is standard SCS. It’s a very basic system you are not getting nuance or character out of the counters. Don’t come expecting tank types, armour thickness and differentiated movement rates.
Solo: I played both sides hard and gave no quarter either way, and the loss piles show it. Of course solo players can be biased. If you have won this easily as the Germans, I want to hear how.
Table Experience & Components
Multi-Man Publishing, and the maps are what they are , you either like them or you don’t. I don’t mind them; I think they’re fine.
Counters are fine. This is the first title I’ve had printed in Japan by MMP and they feel a little thin to me. Plus the rule booklet came apart pretty quickly, due to stapling issues.
The box is the nicest part same art as the original, but a satin finish and a different, classier green. I like it.
And the rules are the rules. It’s SCS. It is what it is.
Play Time / Replay / Rules Consumption
Rules consumption: 8–10 pages, then you’re off. Effectively no teach burden if you have seen any SCS.
Turns play quickly and the game is interactive throughout. The German gets almost nothing after the first couple of turns once the Luftlande is in you are on your own until turn 11 or 12, when 9th Panzer and the 11th and other elements arrive. That stretch gets hairy, and it’s where the game makes you want to play until the 9th arrives so you can have some payback against the Orc swarms of Dutch!
Replay driver: the puzzle of the German win, which I have not solved. Replay killer: the air-availability swing, which decides more than you do.