Keep’em Rolling:Race to the Rhine is a new edition of the fan-favorite, innovative award-winning board game 1944: Race to the Rhine. It contains the updated original game and four different expansions allowing 1-4 players to recreate the experience of rolling through the plains, villages, and cities of France and Benelux in an exciting race to be the first Allied commander to cross the German border on the Rhine.
Keep’em Rolling: Race to the Rhine, the first in the series of logistics-focused euro-style wargames from PHALANX, offers a unique approach to conducting military campaigns. The game emphasizes the importance of keeping your ever-advancing units supplied with fuel, ammunition, and food, and then moving them through enemy territory. It also highlights the internal rivalry between the most prominent Allied commanders, each one pushing to be the first to reach Germany, with hopes of ending World War II before Christmas.
You move in turns, controlling an Army consisting of three or four Corps, and take two actions per turn. You can move a Corps (and fight a battle, if you encounter Axis troops), draw supplies, draw trucks, transport supplies, or make use of Allied air supremacy. Each Corps needs gas to move, ammo to fight Axis units, and food to feed its soldiers, so a skillful combination of actions is necessary to achieve success. While moving, Corps may be aided by the French Resistance, capture abandoned Axis supplies, and meet crowds of civilians who might be celebrating the liberation – or might request food for the starving.
A commander wins automatically if any of his Corps enters and captures an area across the Rhine. However, to claim victory, the commander must have a continuous connection of Allied-controlled areas from the objective to his Army supply base. If no one achieves automatic victory, then the commander with the most medals wins.
What is new in this edition
Anvil – a modular expansion for the base game taking it to 4 players. The 4th player takes command of the Allied landing operation and invasion of Provence in Southern France in the late summer of 1944.
OB West – a bot-based solitaire variant for the base game that reacts to player actions, posing a challenge to even the most skilled players.
Red Ball Express – a modular variant for the base game that reduces randomness and introduces weather and the much-feared threat of a German counter-offensive.
These Are My Credentials – a standalone solitaire game played on a separate board. The race is not to the Rhine, but to the ports of Brittany, to capture them before the Germans can fortify their positions and destroy the harbor facilities.
