The game begins in the spring of 1941with much of Western Europe and North Africa already under Axis control and Germany set to invade the Soviet Union. At 0620 hours, thirty-man American assault teams - all selected from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Division - began loading, one team each, into one of the twenty Higgins boats bobbing next to the transport that had carried them from England at 0630 hours, the ramped-front, open boats began their run through the surf towards their designated landing area, code-named “Utah Beach.” The offensive to breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was finally under way the Allied D-Day landings had begun.ĪXIS & ALLIES: EUROPE is a strategic level (army/fleet/air force) simulation of the epic struggle by the Allies to liberate Europe and the Middle East from fascist domination. In the deeper Channel waters just off one of the five beaches chosen for the main Allied effort, final preparations for the amphibious assault were getting under way. At 0500 hours, the vast Allied naval armada that had escorted the 150,000 American, British, Canadian, French, and Polish troops who would shortly be assaulting Hitler’s ‘Festung Europa’ began to shell the hardened German coastal defenses that lay directly behind the beach landing zones.Īll along a northern stretch of French coast, the same drama began to play out. It was now 0300 on 6 June, and flights of Allied bombers set about raining thousands of tons of bombs down on the German coastal defenses that bristled along the beaches of the Normandy Peninsula. At about the same time that the glider troops were landing, waves of Allied planes were starting to appear over the French coast.

Within a few hours, the follow-up glider infantry - along with heavy equipment and artillery - began to plow into the fields of Normandy. Their mission was to seal the approaches to the nearby Normandy beaches and to secure safe landing zones for the glider-borne infantry that was scheduled to come in behind them. Starting at 2300 hours on 5 June 1944, thousands of Allied paratroops began to drop into occupied France. The game was designed by Larry Harris and published in 1999 by the Avalon Hill Game Company (TAHGC), a subsidiary of Hasbro Games, Inc. AXIS & ALLIES: EUROPE is a strategic level simulation - based on the phenomenally successful AXIS & ALLIES Game System - of World War II in Europe.

Axis and allies civil war