Highway to the Reich

Highway to the Reich was a highly detailed simulation "monster" board wargame published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1977,^[1] and reprinted by Decision Games in 2008.^[2] It was designed by Jay A. Nelson, Irad B. Hardy and Eric Goldberg, with a second edition of the rules published in July 1977.

The game is set during the Second World War, covering ten days of Operation Market-Garden, from 17 to 26 September 1944, with two hours per turn. It includes four 22" x 34" maps - approximately 3 metres long when fully assembled - at a scale of 600 meters per hex (approximately 1:31,600), showing the terrain from the Meuse-Escaut Canal to the countryside beyond Arnhem. Over 2,500 die-cut counter playing pieces represent individual infantry companies, artillery batteries, and armored troops. The game also includes scenarios for the fighting around Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, and the northward advance of the XXX Corps towards Arnhem. Despite its size, it is still considerably smaller than War in the Pacific, which covered seven full map sheets, and whose second edition included more than 9,000 individual counters.

A review of the game in "The Best of Board Wargaming" (1980) speculated that there might somewhere be "a pair of mad hermits" who had actually played the entire game through, which was estimated to take 350 hours.

A realtime pausable computer version - Airborne Assault: Highway to the Reich - was released by Panther Games and Matrix Games on 1 December 2003.^[3] Its unit-level artificial intelligence was praised as allowing "competent execution by groups of forces in pursuit of terrain-based objectives".^[4]

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