















Can you give me a brief rundown of how the game plays?



The player(s) will have a number of Ranger units organized into the three historical companies that attacked Pointe Du Hoc (Dog, Easy and Fox companies). You choose a company and then select one of its units to activate. By the way, each unit represents a group of about 20 soldiers.



Activation normally involves rolling one or more Movement Dice for that unit and applying the rolled result. But there are four dice to choose from, each of a different color and each carrying a different risk/reward ratio of results.



You can start “safe” with the Green die (which has few chances of casualties but also allows less movement) or go full risk and roll the Black die (lots of casualty and morale loss possibilities, but also the most possible movement) or any combination thereof. But each colored die can only be rolled once per unit – once used, you must then choose a different die to roll.



The more you move forward, the better the progress towards your goals but the more risk you then take on as the unit starts to outrun its support. If you happen to roll a “Stop” or worse, the unit will be stuck in its last position and is done for the turn. It could also suffer casualties equal to the distance it is from its rally point, so the harder you push the more possible losses the unit will take.



The dice handle most of the German combat effects, inflicting “friction” hits on the Ranger units as they move and get certain results. Some of the dice results also cause morale effects and even force the player to draw Event Chits, which can be good or bad for you. These will create independent, historically-based events to occur which will involve everything from German bombardments and counterattacks to Ranger reinforcements landing.



Add to this the occasionally required drawing of Event Cards, which act as a random timing mechanism. These cards can invoke the passing of game time (Time Increments), the preparation and timing of German Counterattacks or the progress of the relief column on its way from Omaha Beach. So the player must constantly mitigate the risk with the rewards and “push his luck” as much as he sees fit.



The object is to defeat German forces, find the hidden German artillery pieces that threaten Omaha and Utah beaches (these could be in many different places), setup roadblocks on the highway to hold up the German reinforcements and to withstand numerous organized German counterattacks.



When the third day ends – or the relief column arrives - the game ends and the player will add up his Victory Points to see how he did.

















How has the game evolved during development?

At the start, I used the original IMS game as the starting point. But I quickly realized that it would need some updating and more specifically, it had to be made more user-friendly and play more smoothly.



I knew that Crowbar would be a much bigger game, physically and scope-wise, and I also knew that I wanted to make the game more appealing to the greater gaming public. To that end, the first mechanic I dropped from the original was the d6 Dice Matrix for determining movement.



I opted instead to go with custom icon dice in order to remove the need to constantly check the chart for your movement result. Luckily, Mark Walker totally agreed with my decision, as he also is on a mission (from God!) to make our wargames more palatable to all gamers.



Once we started down that path, the counters grew to typical Flying Pig Games 1” squares, the map became much more spacious and the old CRT and modifier-heavy combat mechanism graduated to a much simpler Combat Dice system.



In addition, a certain “exploration” aspect to the game blossomed in that the player could not only discover the much-sought-after hidden guns, but he would also encounter other historically-based surprises.



Also, I decided to add a cooperative and multi-player mode to the game so that larger groups of gamers could enjoy the game together, something that I think all wargames need to do more of. So the design really did evolve in many constructive ways and all in an effort to make the design more attractive to a more diverse pool of gamers.







