Operation Canuck 2023

From 1943 to the end of World War Two, both the American Office of Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) materially assisted the anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi Partisan movement in Italy. Teams of agents were inserted behind the Axis lines by submarine or parachute to make contact with the Partisan groups and brigades.

An example of this is Operation Canuck, an SOE mission undertaken near Turin in 1945. Captain Robert “Buck” MacDonald of Nova Scotia, seconded from the Royal Canadian Dragoons to the 2nd British Special Air Service Regiment, arrived with his team in the area of Alba, a large town about 30 km from Turin, in January 1945. They set up their main base in the village of Castino and began to work with local Partisan leaders to train and arm fighters and arrange air drops of supplies and weapons. The climax of the operation was on 26 April 1945 when their combined forces liberated Alba and forced the occupiers to surrender, several days before Allied troops arrived in the area.

Operation CANUCK is a short game that portrays the activities of this mission in an abstract way. The game is intended for solitaire play. During the game the single player (the Partisan) will draw from a deck of ordinary playing cards. The Partisan will deliberately select from the red cards drawn to execute operations representing the efforts of their forces and draw randomly from the black cards to show the Fascist, German and collaborator (collectively, “Axis”) counter-actions.

This is a free print-and-play game. Besides the material downloaded, players need 6 dice and a deck of ordinary playing cards.

—description from the designer