I commenced to slog on and off through the first section or two of the rules, not even thinking about getting into Production, Diplomacy, or Research for now, focusing instead on introductory concepts like Look at the Pretty Pretty Maps and Hey! I Recognize This D6 From Outdoor Survival! The subtleties of the Ultra codebreaking program and getting the Dutch to align with the Allies would have to wait until I understood such basic menu items as zones of control, attrition rolls, and what strategic re-deployment was. I was even unfamiliar with the types of air and naval units I would be dealing with. Interceptors? Bridgeheads? Wha?

It wasn’t long before I felt lost, frightened, and itchy. Rules in the core book are repeated often to make them easier to access later, but for me this made it rough to know what I should be focusing on right now in any given section and what I could safely wait till later to comprehend. The sheer number of exceptions to exceptions I would be dealing with also threatened to leave my cerebellum by the side of a long dirt road, and because I was not even an amateur historian, the reasons for all the loopholes and modifiers would never be clear until I seriously hit the books. Worst of all, I wasn’t even close to getting a sense of the order of things: what came first, what came next, what phases could suddenly pop up between two others.