I think of non-academic military history being divided into two categories: popular history, and wargamer history. Popular history is the general understanding of events as they happened. It might be influenced by books, or movies, or serious BBC documentaries with people taking very serious poses and discussing events with the aid of file footage. Wargamer history is something different.

Wargamers tend to be more informed about about military history than the general populace. That’s not surprising: model railroaders probably know more about trains than most people, too. Often, this is to their advantage: Western wargamers probably appreciate better than their non-wargaming countrymen the contribution the Soviet Union made in defeating Hitler, and the magnitude of the colossal struggle on the eastern front. But I think that wargamers unconsciously internalize facts about military history from the wargames they play, and this can sometimes be distorted because games are about being fun and not necessarily about being perfect history simulators.

The Battle of the Bulge is probably the most over-gamed topic in wargaming, but for competitive balance reasons has been tweaked endlessly to keep the German side competitive, which really means that any Bulge game that you play that gives the Axis a decent chance to reach the Meuse has made them completely overpowered. The best example of this is probably Shenandoah Studio’s Battle of the Bulge, one of the finest wargames ever made for the digital format (PC, mobile, or anything non-paper). It’s a tremendous experience, but often ends with multiple German panzer divisions driving across the Meuse and toward Antwerp. Not even remotely plausible. But great fun.

But there is another way in which history can be misunderstood through wargames, and that is when the game mechanics recreate the general flow of a campaign without being able to translate the nuances. Barbarossa is a particularly good example of this.

If you’ve watched any documentaries about the invasion of Russia, you will likely have heard about how dramatic the initial Axis advance was, and how by the first week of July, the Germans were at the Dnieper River, just in front of Smolensk. In early October, the Germans initiated Operation Typhoon, the final thrust towards Moscow.

It is around 600 kilometres from the Polish border (as defined by the German/Soviet partition of 1939) to Smolensk. It is only about another 400 kilometres from Smolensk to Moscow. The invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941. Approximately two weeks later, the Germans were at the Dnieper.

They had gotten over halfway to the Kremlin in fourteen days. They didn’t assault Moscow for another three months.

Ok, sure, yeah, there was the great right turn to Kiev, resulting in a big encirclement there. That started in August. But if the Germans were moving so fast, the question remains, what happened at the height of the summer?

David Glantz, who has done more work than anyone in English to correct the historical record of the battle, has focused a lot of attention on the battle at Smolensk, arguing (with the advantage of Russian archives only made available after 1991) that the Soviets stopped the Germans cold at Smolensk in July, and that the front line didn’t move because the Germans were fighting for their lives. There are a lot of reasons for this delay, some of which has to do with German logistical difficulties, but even more of which is attributable to dogged, desperate Soviet counterattacks. Here is an excerpt from the first volume of his two-volume study Barbarossa Derailed about the battle for the city of Smolensk.

By late July both Hitler and the OKW were increasingly aware of the vast scope of their undertaking, and, for several reasons, it was clear to them, while still strong, the Wehrmacht was no longer capable of conducting simultaneous full-scale offensive operations along the Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev strategic axes as called for by Plan Barbarossa. First, despite their enormously successful initial advances, by late July the army groups had outrun their fragile logistical support structure and lacked essential supplies. For example, Second Panzer Group’s embattled bridgehead over the Desna River at El’nia was 720 kilometres from the nearest German railhead, poor roads made it difficult for wheeled vehicles, let alone foot infantry, to keep pace with the dwindling number of tanks in the spearheads – the infantry was running short of boots – and now Army quartermasters indicated that winter clothing was available in only limited quantities.

[…] perhaps most depressing to the German leadership, although the Red Army had suffered enormous losses, rather than collapsing as expected, its resistance became fiercer and more intense by the day. As a result, while the army groups’ advance slowed, it became increasingly difficult to close the gaps between them without adversely affecting their ability to accomplish their primary missions.

Although not all German leaders saw the situation so clearly and pessimistically, many sought clearer guidance as to how to bring the war to a quick conclusion. Even Hitler grumbled that, had he known Guderian’s prewar tank strength figures were so accurate, he might not have started the war. The solution Hitler and many of his senior commanders chose was to surround and destroy bypassed Soviet forces to prevent their cadres from escaping to fight another day. However, younger commanders like Guderian and von Manstein opposed this policy because it slowed their exploitation and allowed the enemy to reconstruct his defenses after each breakthrough.

This leads to the fallacy of the encirclement game, which assumes that the German strategy in the previous paragraph was the correct one, and success depends on implementing it adequately, while the Soviet goal is to prevent the encirclement itself. So the game turns into historically themed competitive integer arrangement.

But the Soviet strategy in the first months of Barbarossa – at least the strategy propagated by Stalin – wasn’t to simply avoid encirclement: it was to viciously counterattack wherever possible in an attempt to seize the initiative. The results were not immediately evident, and the Germans closed the pockets around Bialystok and Minsk successfully, capturing hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners in a pattern than would be duplicated all the way to October. But the attrition the Germans suffered in these early battles told heavily later, leading to the ferocious fighting on the Dnieper and around Smolensk.

The battle for Smolensk between July and September in 1941 is exactly the kind of momentum change that is so hard to model in a wargame, because while the tempo of the campaign slowed, it subsequently resumed. The German advance on Kiev caught the Soviets off guard, as did the assault on Moscow. The Germans never lost the initiative, or at least never surrendered it to the Soviets.

Wargames, though, aren’t good at this kind of tempo. With their perfect information and historical hindsight, they lend themselves to exactly the kind of decision making that is impossible in the moment. What this specifically does is to limit changes in momentum.

In a wargame, if you give players a fixed pool of forces, and establish objectives, they will equilibrate their relative use so as to minimize their disadvantages. That’s a fancy way of saying that if the Soviet player knows how many resources he has, it’s unlikely he will throw them into a desperate, losing battle for Smolensk, only to leave himself underprepared for an attack on Moscow three months later, and as a result lose another million guys. Instead, he’ll figure out how far between Smolensk and Moscow he can establish the optimal defensive line, and delay until he can establish it. Why counterattack when there is no chance of success?

All of the games I’ve played, from The Russian Campaign to Russian Front to Sturm Nach Osten to Russia Besieged all have the same flaw: they treat the summer campaign as a continuous battle of encirclement until the weather stops the Germans in front of Moscow. Barbarossa is all blitzkrieg until the magic weather roll. Which is the worst myth of the whole tragic history. The Russians died by the millions, but they had a lot more to do with Hitler’s eventual failure than “General Winter.”

All wargames tend towards equilibrium, because all of their variables are known. The shifts in equilibrium are artificial, and a result of a change in variables. Sorry, I shouldn’t say artificial. Maybe I should say “imposed.” Usually they are imposed by reinforcements, or changes in some rule that shifts the balance of power. But the point is that the games will find an equilibrium between these events. In a game of The Russian Campaign, the Russian player knows the German player has a certain number of turns to win. He will do everything he can to prevent that, but he knows when his reinforcements are coming, and when the weather will arrest the all-important German second impulse mechanized movement. Rather than an all-out defense at Smolensk, he can decide on a more defensible line further east, at the point where the Germans are going to just run out of steam. And then his Siberians come.

This kind of equilibrium shift is much harder to achieve organically, because it relies on players making decisions that don’t fit the situation. Tempo changes like this often happen with inexperienced players, who haven’t internalized a game’s variables. Those can be the most fun, but are often tarred by the “oh, if I’d known how this would come out, I would have done this.” Which is what they will do. Next time. In wargames, you can always do something different “next time.” Because history repeats itself as soon as you open the box again.

So the challenge of wargames is to keep you from knowing exactly what will happen, so you have to make decisions in the dark. But if you do this too explicitly, it just seems arbitrary and broken. Variable weather is one way to do it for Barbarossa, but when the Germans roll “clear weather” in November and roll through the Kremlin en route to the Urals, it doesn’t seem organic. It seems lucky. And no one wants to win solely because of that.

So what can you do? Well, you can create a one-shot wargame in a fictional universe in which a third person keeps all the information to himself and parcels it out to the players himself, bit by bit, so that they have to act on the totality of the information as it happens. Good luck selling that in a box for $60. The other option is to keep the information horizon sufficiently close that you can’t make anything but the most general long-term plans because there are so many unknowns in between. I think this is what Ted Raicer has done with The Dark Valley.

Oh, the chit pulls, you’re thinking. Yeah, you told us about that last time, you say. Sort of. It’s true that with chit pulls, you never know who is doing what next. But that just makes everything seem crazy: I lost because he pulled his chits five times in a row and I never got to move. To make it work, you need to hinge something else on the chit pulls, so that even if you get all your chits happening at once, you have to have done something to take advantage of it. And that’s where I think Ted Raicer has gone, although I don’t yet know if he got there.

Each chit gives a player different abilities. There are combat chits, movement chits, and chits that let you choose whether to move or attack. The Soviet player has counterattack chits, which are a great way of simulating the directives from Stalin ordering the Soviet troops to attack regardless of cost. The Germans have separate chits for each of the panzer groups, which allow movement and combat by units within three hexes of the panzer group headquarters. I’ve seen various ways of representing the four panzer groups (including the extreme of John Astell’s game 1941 from GDW that made each one a single super-counter) and I think that this is one of the best ways I’ve seen of modeling the German operational armored groupings.

But the reason that Ted Raicer’s system isn’t just another rehash of the variable activation mechanic is that there is one other chit in there that doesn’t allow either player to move or attack. Instead, it forces them to check supply, and is called Logistics. And it seems to me that this chit is the key to the whole game.

Supply is important in The Dark Valley because if you look at the CRT in the previous article, you’ll notice that it stops at 6:1 odds. You can attack a single Russian rifle division with nine panzer divisions at 40:1, but it will round down to 6:1 for combat purposes. Give that single rifle division a fortified zone to defend in, and it gets a left-shift, not from 40:1 down to something, but from 6:1 to 5:1. Even at 6:1, you only have a 1/3 chance of destroying the defending unit without taking any casualties. At 5:1, you basically need to roll a six.

This leads to two strategies. One is to roll really high all the time, which if it works consistently for you is better done professionally in Nevada. The second is to do what Ted Raicer wants you to do, which is not to frontally assault, but .. encircle.

The way Logistics works is that when the chit is drawn, both players immediately determine who is in supply. Units that are unable to trace a line of communication are isolated, and if they are still isolated and adjacent to a supplied enemy unit during the attrition phase at the end of the game turn, they are eliminated. So if you can move your units before your opponent has a chance to react, and encircle his units, and then get the magic Logistics chit to appear, you can essentially freeze your opponent before he can react.

At this point you’ve decided I took 2,100 words to construct semi-circular logic that contradicts my original point. But while it’s true that this makes encirclement an extremely powerful strategy, it removes the certainty of implementation even if you happen to solve the panzer Sudoku. In other words, you may not be able to make the encirclement work through no fault of your own. Then what happens?

That’s the big question I have about The Dark Valley, because there must have been plenty of playtest sessions where the chit draw fell against the Axis. If this fact meant an automatic Axis loss, then I need all the playtesters to chip in and refund my $60 plus shipping, because that’s just negligent playtesting. But I suspect it isn’t an automatic Axis loss at all. Instead, there are going to be times when you can’t close the pocket, and all the Soviets will leak out. It’s these times that the Soviets can take advantage and counterattack, going for a momentum-shifting opportunity provided by the chit draw.

Not only that, but on the German side you’ll have to make movement decisions before the Logistics chit shows up, and you will probably be gambling on this chit appearing not now, but when you need it. You’ll also need to carefully guard your own logistics network.

Because that’s the last element that ties this design together, or at least I assume it tries to. I’m still playing the game, people. The Dark Valley makes German railheads explicit through the use of depot counters. In other games, supply lines are simply traced to the nearest contiguous rail hex (The Russian Campaign, Russia Besieged), or require units to spend movement points to convert rail lines (Russian Front) or have special, dedicated units to repair rail lines (War in the East). In The Dark Valley, railheads are represented by depots, which move along rail lines in the attrition phase but do so before isolated units have been eliminated. So you can’t count on eliminating a pocket to clear your rail lines: you have to do so during combat. This leads to all sorts of computational acrobatics during combat because you need to avoid attacking certain units and allowing them to retreat onto the Soviet rail lines.

The screen above shows the Baltic Military District facing Army Group North. The green arrows show the path of the two depot counters: they are restricted to the rail lines, and can only move as far as the result of a modified die roll or until they reach an enemy unit. The black arrows show the general thrust of the initial encirclement. Because the Axis units get to move multiple times per turn, it is very likely they will outrun their supply depots early. I’m sure this is intended.

I’m wondering how much laggard supply depots will play into the game flow. I found the rail repair mechanic in War in the East to be quite restrictive, but all such games need to model the difficulty the Germans had in maintaining supply simply due to an inadequate logistics net.

The impression I’m getting so far from The Dark Valley is that the Axis basically need everything to go exactly right for them and then some in order to win. Which happens to be exactly like the real campaign, which some historians suggest was unwinnable from the start. But just like the Battle of the Bulge, designing a game that’s historical might not exactly be fun to play. I hope I’m not about to spend a few dozen hours reaching an unpleasant conclusion.

I suspect some people reading this may have their own opinions about how the game shakes out. If you’re one of them, please let me know in the comments.