Anzio the Bloodiest Beachhead

Anzio - The Bloodiest Beachhead is a boardgame, designed by my own hand some time ago, looking at the desperate first six weeks of Operation Shingle, the Allied landing on the Anzio beaches, Italy 1944.

The battle was characterised by an initial sparse German defence, giving the Allies the potential for an immediate advance inland, with the way to Rome open to them. Rather than advance immediately into the unknown, the invaders first consolidated the beachhead, but the Germans, who already had a response plan (Case Richard), fed forces into the area, increasingly solidifying the defences. When the Allies did resume the advance, it was against a determined and strengthened defender, aided by a battlefield that had become a landscape dominated by mud and soft ground.

The following post offers a few observations and discusses why this design ended up being self-published rather than getting the commercial treatment from one of the mainstream game publishers. It then leads onto an older post that looks at the system in detail with the usual AAR that shows the flow of play.

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