Market Garden memorial game, memoir 44 at a grand scale.

[YPU]

As it is the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden this year a couple of my friends and club mates here in Nijmegen wanted to put up a large scale memorial game using the Memoir 44 6-8 player map.

Now that's a more ambitious project than I ever try in less than a year, but these guys do actually paint their lead pile unlike me.

I'm sure all of you are familiar with Memoir 44, but I think it is worth sharing the sheer size of this "overlord play" style map




We have a basic hex battle mat to start with, with hexes about 12cm flat to flat. Even at that size, we'll be playing very rough and tumble with size and scale. We'll have to, sticking to that Memoir 44 map.

Miniatures are well underway, going by good old 6mm of course!





We are mixing a couple of brands. Now I can't take any credit for painting anything, but some of the vehicles are 2d6 miniatures which I sculpted so I can pretend that I contributed there.




In normal M44 you have units consisting of 2-4 plastic figures, so 4 infantry, 3 tanks or 2 artillery per "unit" We are scaling that up and creating these unit bases. We are currently considering adding the units name and Insignia to the bases, it seems appropriate for a memorial game.


For scenery a start has been made on forests, corrugated cardboard, insulation foam and flocking are simple but considering the area we have to cover, probably the best route we can take.




Now I hear you think, why YPU sounds like you haven't done anything on your end yet... And you'd be correct. Hopefully I'll be churning out roads and rivers in the same way I did for my 6mm sci-fi table soon.
Something like this:



though a lot narrower rivers and fewer road markings.


I also hope to start 3d printing, and where necessary, sculpting the important landmarks. Now I think we can all agree that when doing a market garden game in Nijmegen, the first thing should be all the bridges. They function as objectives in the scenario as well after all. After that I may try doing other iconic landmarks like churches, though considering the amount of roads and rivers that's a long way down the to-do list yet.

[YPU]

Having run the map trough CAD in the correct size I now know that we will need

-Just over 10 METERS of road. Not scale meters, no actual full-size meters.

-About 5 Meters of rivers and canals. The second one at least is allowed to be mostly straight and featureless to set them apart from the rivers.

-Enough forest to mark 78 hexes clearly as forest hexes, remember, 12 cm hexes.

-Buildings for 13 urban hexes

-5 Bridges


That last one is providing one of my first questions. I've done my best to overlay the M44 map over a historic map, and action report maps and I think this is the most accurate orientation I'm going to get. Its not essential but having a windrose or some North marker would be nice to add to the table.




You'll notice the red circle. In that corner of the map is the town of valkenswaard and 2 bridges. They are not named on the game map. My best guess is that the top one is "Joe's bridge" in Lommel, Belgium. Assuming I'm correct that makes the waterway there the Maas-Scheldekanaal, or at least a abstraction of  that and other nearby waterways. This leaves the other bridge, however.



Bigger picture for clarity, note orientation is not north facing.


This fantastic map from traces of war suggests that if one of them is Joe's bridge, the other is probably the crossing point used by 12th or 8th corps.



We know 12th had a bridgehead at the town of Geel, however I'm stumped to find what bridge and exact location.

[6milPhil]

That's gonna be grand. 

[ithoriel]

Can't help with the identification of the bridge but I just have to say that this is a fantastic project!

I look forward to pictures of progress ... and of the finished article.

Now, who can I lure into a game of Memoir 44? 

[fred]

A very cool project.

So how big is the table, if you need 10m of roads?

[YPU]

A very cool project.

So how big is the table, if you need 10m of roads?

We are using larger hex maps (2 put together) so we have overspill, but the actual playing area should be like this in centimeters.

[fred]

So around 12’ x4’ for those of us who live in the strange mix of metric and imperial measurements!

At one point I started sketching out Market Garden at a 5cm to 1km scale, with the expectation it would just about fit on 8’ length of table. But it stalled due to sheer scale of the project, and lack of rules to work at this scale of game.

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses

[blacksoilbill]

This sounds like an impressive project: some serious terrain building to happen. I look forawrd to seeing it develop.

[jon_1066]

Cool idea.  Was the area really that heavily wooded?

Also do you have the Groesbeek heights?  It was an important factor in the US 82nd thinking.

How will you treat the island?  There was only a ferry for the Germans until the Arnhem bridge was cleared.

Will you give 1st Airborne a chance to get the rail bridge?

[YPU]

Cool idea.  Was the area really that heavily wooded?

Also do you have the Groesbeek heights?  It was an important factor in the US 82nd thinking.

How will you treat the island?  There was only a ferry for the Germans until the Arnhem bridge was cleared.

Will you give 1st Airborne a chance to get the rail bridge?

Short answer no.

long answer: Memoir 44 abstracts a lot of things in favor of playability, a hex can only include one terain type and hold one unit at a time for example. The overlord maps being so large, and playing with 8 people at once tend to be even more simple to prevent complicated terrain interactions from slowing down an already big and complex game.
Doing some very rough calculations, each hex square is a bit over 4km flat to flat. A ground scale of about 1/35000 (somebody double-check my math there.)

The eastern border of the Netherlands was and is one of the more wooded areas. Never hugely dense, but lots of sections of wood. I think that overall the forest represents the areas where that 4km hex would be more LOS blocking than not. Plus some fudging for gameplay I'm sure. The Memoir map tiles look like dense forest, I'm sure my friend making the forests will be happy to go a little sparser on them, if nothing else, it will leave room for the actual miniatures.

Groesbeek, visually, probably goes into one of those "nice to add as a visual detail if we have the time" Mechanically, the way hills work in memoir, it would not work much differently from a forest hext. Actually deciding where it would be on the map is going to be a challenge, its all a bit skewed to get it into that line of a map  EDIT: On closer look, the forest hex at the top of the map above Nijmegen (as presented here) would be the obvious location.

IIRC there is a special rule for Arnhem bridge, but I don't have the scenario rulebook here so I can't confirm. I know there are special rules for the "assault boats" used to cross the river here in Nijmegen, so I may be forgetting about other special rules as well.

Due to the size of those hexes, any bridges less than a couple of kilometres apart effectively become one bridge tile. I am considering making the rail bridge a visual part of the map, but have yet to see how that feels on a hex.
As a side note, I was somewhat expecting to find some 3d files of the bridges online for inspiration, but I'm quite disappointed in what's out there. Guess I'll have to fix that.