Valor & Victory: Shield of Cholm (DLC)

I'll be straight with you: my usual beat is netcode and time-to-kill, and Valor & Victory is about as far from a live-service shooter as you can get. But board game conversions with multiplayer hooks are still games people buy, and this one has a vocal enough community that it deserves a fair read before you pull the trigger. What you are buying is a hex-grid, turn-based adaptation of Barry Doyle's free print-and-play board game, transplanted to PC by one-man studio Yobowargames. Each scenario puts you in command of a small slice of the post-D-Day fighting in Normandy, with US or British forces squaring off against German defenders. The scale is deliberately tight. Each side fields maybe a company's worth of units at most, broken into squads, half-squads, leader tokens, support weapons like machine guns and anti-tank guns, and the occasional armored vehicle. Turns run through five sequential phases: a command phase where you split squads or pass heavy weapons between stacks; a fire phase; a movement phase where enemy opportunity fire can pin advancing units cold; an enemy defensive fire phase for anyone who held their shot; and a final advance-and-assault phase where infantry can attempt close combat on an adjacent hex. Scenarios clock in at 30 to 60 minutes for experienced players, which is genuinely the one thing almost everyone agrees on. The system has real teeth when you are playing against a human. Fire-and-maneuver discipline matters. Keeping units in hard cover while suppressing enemy stacks before crossing open ground is not optional. The German MG42, when it catches a squad in the open, can delete an entire unit in one roll. Leader units add a hit modifier to their stack, so positioning them correctly creates genuine decisions. The PBEM (play-by-email) implementation and hotseat mode both work, and with most scenarios running five to seven turns, async PBEM games move fast enough to hold attention. The random scenario generator and Steam Workshop support add longevity on top of the 19 base scenarios, which cover actions from Pegasus Bridge to the hedgerow fighting of the American sector. The problems surface hard in solo play. The AI defends competently, tightening its lines when you punch a gap through somewhere, but it attacks with all the aggression of someone who forgot why they sat down at the table. It will routinely fail to press a charge on the final turn even when that gamble is the only path to a win. Some players have flagged the random number generator feeling uneven, with streaks of middling results that skew outcomes in small-unit scenarios where each roll carries heavy weight. The UI has misclick issues that can force a scenario restart, there is no way to check scenario objectives mid-game without scrolling the map or returning to the main menu, and the scenario editor, while easy to use, lacks a modular map-builder that the original board game actually had. Post-launch updates have added artillery support, snipers, and air power, which were missing at release, so the situation has improved, but roughness remains. If you are a tabletop Squad Leader or ASL veteran looking for a fast digital fix with a friend on the other end, this scratches a real itch. If you are primarily a solo player expecting a polished AI opponent, the experience is inconsistent enough to frustrate. The DLC pipeline has been active, covering Stalingrad, Arnhem, Kursk, Shield of Cholm, and the Pacific theater, so the content breadth is there for anyone who gets hooked on the base game.

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