JUBILEE DIEPPE, 1942. by William Adams, from Interphase Games, POB 11510, Edmonton Alberta T5J 3K7 Canada

Adams/Interphase are the folks that brought you 1763, a rather dismal effort on what we provincials like to call the French and Indian War. This one is on the Canadian-led, Allied attack on Dieppe (France); a sort of misguided preview to Normandy. Canada's official wargaming magazine, the CWJ, napalmed this one with little mercy. I don't think it's quite as bad as they said, but it's not going to pull in the mainstream.

My review copy was the "downscale" version: unmounted map, no box. The 16"x32" map comes in three, heavy-duty sections and is colorful, if not the height of graphic state-of-art. Counters are one-side only, easily readable, colored, but, again, about 15 years behind the times. The excellent, attractive rules booklet - in two languages, one of them English - is actually multi-colored. Basic rules cover 3+ small pages, so we're not dealing with Atlantic Wall here. What we are dealing with is AH/Classic style wargaming, with a vaguely more modern CRT and some rather basic special rules to spice up the act, such as units becoming "snafued", special armour rules, etc. One of the really weird sets of relationships the game produces is that armoured units can fire almost as far as they can move in one hour! That appears to be the fault of having armored units having a maximum one-turn, unimpeded, road movement capability of three miles! (Better check the transmission, Jacques; we don't seem to be getting anywhere.)

My problem with the game is not that it's design systems are dated, not by years, but by decades. It's that the Dieppe operation was really a raid - not a full-scale invasion - and it was handled horribly. The Canadian player doesn't seem to to have much of a chance to do much better, although he is allowed virtually total leeway as to where he lands. On the plus side, it IS the only game on the subject available (SimCan's really dreary Dieppe, from 1977, was shot by an editorial firing squad), and it does move along right smartly.