Valor & Victory (2020)

[Whiterook]

So, have you ever picked up a Print ‘N Play game somewhere, and then years later, find out it’s still around, but completely different?

…that’s what happened to me this morning, with a game I picked up online back in 2007, called Valor & Victory, which was I have the strongest memory of having printed out the initial rulebook, but the faintest memory of whether I downloaded any counters, charts, maps, etc!!! OMG, the cobwebs in my cranium!!!!

Valor & Victory is a game of WWII Squad-Level Combat

Through the shattered ruins of a quaint European village, to the scorched sands of North Africa, and on the deadly beaches of a mist-shrouded Pacific island, Valor & Victory puts you in command of the troops and machines that fought across the battlefields of World War II.

Valor & Victory is a fast playing, easy to learn World War II squad-level game system. V&V gets you into the action quickly, without requiring you to learn a lot of minutiae and unnecessary detail. But don't let that fool you — Valor & Victory is a complete WWII wargaming system, covering infantry and armored combat, artillery and air strikes, snipers, close assaults, armored overruns, fortifications, and much more!

Valor & Victory may be easy to learn, but it's challenging and fun. So whether you're looking for an evening of serious wargaming action, or simply a quick battle at lunch, Valor & Victory delivers!

New players are advised to download a limited set of files to try 3 scenarios, before deciding to dive deeper into the game.
See below in the "Community Wiki" section.

AWARDS & HONORS
2012 Charles S. Roberts Best Desktop Published (DTP) / Print-and-Play / Postcard Game Nominee

~ BoardGameGeek

…back in 2007-ish, the game looked like this…







I originally picked it up because of the Squad Leader-like boards, and the counter similarities of Panzergrenadier… two of my favorite games! At the time, I figured, what the heck!?! …free rules and maybe the best of both worlds, especially since I could not wrap my head around the even newer version of Squad Leader… Advanced Squad Leader and it’s ridiculously enormous rules that calculate whether a stuck zipper effects the a bazooka round in the snow.

So here’s where I am at as of this moment:

1. I know I printed out the rulebook… that’s my first step, in finding it (I know it’s in a flexible binder somewhere in my under-renovation basement!).
   
2. I want to find that original rulebook, so I can compare it with the March 2021 revised D+1 Standard Game Rules, maps, and components… to basically see if this updated latest version matches or varies widely from the original. These new rules are 24 pages long; which is interesting to me, because I swear the rulebook I downloaded about a decade and a half ago were about an inch thick! …I may be wrong on that and I’ll comment on it when (if) I find that original printed rulebook!
3. The third thing I want to do is, check my flash drives! What do I have, in terms of anything I originally downloaded? (…as in, counters, maps, aids, etc.)

…so the importance of the third item listed above is, what you face as someone that may be coming across this game for the first time, or revisiting it like me: The game as is these days is a hot mess to assemble the necessary components!!! The website for the game doesn’t exist anymore; and BoardGameGeek has the new rules readily available enough (I downloaded it this morning), but the maps and components (counters, maps, aids) are scattered within some (as of today) 224 file entries.

And of course, there’s no clear indication what the game looks like now! You can’t really go by the pictures on BGG (214 of them at present), as they show the old games’ components. I suppose that’s where item 2 above comes in, where I can compare images of things like counters and maps from the old rulebook to the newer D+1 version.

This is going to take some work to flesh out an actual game here! …I’ll of course, share my finding here!!!

[Whiterook]

As an aside, there also appears to have been an expansion rulebook made, called Victory & Valor: Western Front Expansion…

The Yanks have arrived! The Western Front Expansion continues the Valor & Victory D+1 Series that started with H-Hour, and features the complete Western Front Order of Battle for the United States. This expansion also adds six new historically based scenarios, four geomorphic map sheets and 230 U.S. unit counters. Can you lead your men off the bloody beaches of Normandy, through nightmarish hedgerow country, and eventually on to liberate Paris itself? In the immortal words of General Eisenhower, “We will accept nothing less than full Victory!”

—description from the designer

The only copy I find is $185 at Noble Knight Games. No thank you.

[Whiterook]

Found out that there’s a Steam engine version of this game, for those that want to get right into playing, directly from their computer!

[Whiterook]

Scenario vs Map Dependency chart