Salerno '43

It’s been a while since I’ve played one of the Simonich WW2 “zoc bond” system games, and forgot how much fun they are. My usual hex and counter oopponent of many years came over and brought his copy of Salerno ‘43. This one has been on our radar screen for a couple of years, and also on my 2026 target list.

Here’s the end of Turn 2, the Allies have landed and achieved a small number of their goals for the campaign:

We didn’t do a lot of combat in the game, probably not enough combat to tip it either one or way the other. Most of the activity from the Allies side was positioning to attempt to encircle the Germans and cut off supply, while the Germans hunkered down to wait for reinforcements. The Allies also had the challenge of staying in supply. While a charge into the hinterland might well have worked, it also might well have been disastrous if cut off from the beachheads.

Here’s the end of Turn 6, where we called the game:

AAR

Overall, I think this was a draw. While my Allies were in a pretty good position to scoop up the last couple of victory points, the Germans were also in a pretty good position to hold out. I think it would have come down to the Allies getting either 6 points for a loss, or just squeaking a win with 7 points. So much would have come down to the the attrition rolls in the end.

Also of note: we clarified some rules issues with NotebookLM and ChatGPT. This turned out to be really, really cool. Both tools returned accurate and precise answers to our questions.

ChatGPT-5.4 Thinking, which came out around a week from this writing, also answered one of our questions from a cold start. It went out and found the rules pdf, apparently consulted various forums (here at BGG, reddit, etc), and delivered correctly.

Dictating a question into a machine and then getting a correct answer is just incredible.