Operation Barclay the board game is indeed based on Operation Barclay the military con, where Allied forces concocted an elaborate deception to fool the Axis powers into thinking their attack on southern Europe would come through the Balkans, rather than through Sicily. (If you’ve heard of Operation Mincemeat, it was part of Operation Barclay.) This two-player asymmetrical game has the players playing as Allies and Axis – not Axis & Allies, that’s an entirely different game that takes about ten years to play – where the Axis (Abwehr) player has a limited number of rounds to guess where the Allied (LCS) player’s attack will be, as well as where their backup location is. (As I write this, the game is on sale for $10 at 25th Century, 75% off the regular price.)
Each of the five theaters on the map of Europe gets five face-down evidence tokens, placed by the Allied player, which come in red or green. The Allied player’s primary area for attack gets four green tokens and one red; their secondary area gets three green tokens and two red; the other three areas get two green tokens and three red apiece.
The game play in Operation Barclay revolves around a sort of modified poker; the players will draw up hands of five cards, playing three cards face up, then playing two face down, with a betting phase in between that allows you to bet that your opponent will have the better hand. At the end of each round, the players divide up the available evidence tokens for that round, based on who has the stronger hand, who has more symbols on their cards, and who bet correctly on which player would end up with the stronger hand.
The Axis player then gets to flip over as many tokens on the map as they have collected evidence tokens in that round. Once they’ve flipped enough tokens to identify the two areas where the Allied player has planned an attack, they win the game; if they fail to do so after six rounds (months), the Allied player wins the game.
Not to bury the lede too much, but I couldn’t get there with Operation Barclay. There are some good ideas in the game, especially the deduction part around the evidence tokens, but I don’t think the poker aspect works, especially since there’s going to be a huge luck component there, and I’m already kind of over poker as a game mechanic anyway. I also think the game is a little unbalanced towards the Allied player, but that could be just a matter of needing more plays.
The deck does have some features that make this more than a poker derivative. Many cards have special powers that might let you draw two cards and keep one, or shuffle the three cards on top of the discard pile called the double-cross deck; some of these cards have number values, while others don’t, meaning they can’t help you form a better poker hand. Some cards have multiple values on them, so you can decide which one to use when you reveal your entire hand. (This also makes it possible to get five of a kind.) There are suits matching the various theaters, so you can still get a straight flush, although the game doesn’t appear to count a flush as anything. And some cards can only be played in the first phase, when you play three cards face-down, while others can only be played in the second phase, when you play your last two cards face-up.
There’s a decent idea here in the logic-puzzle mechanic for the Axis player to figure out where the Allies will attack. I think in the end I wish designer Maurice Suckling, who is mostly known for wargames, had done something other than use this poker-adjacent mechanic to determine how the Axis player gets to reveal tokens, not just because it’s incongruous with the theme, but because it doesn’t make the game that fun to play. I love deduction in games, and I wish Operation Barclay had more of it and less Axis Hold ‘Em.