Wargame_[space]
War in the East
War in the East: On the dusty track to oblivion
[The War in the East game diary is an intermittent, long-running series I started in early 2011. The first part covered Operation Barbarossa. The second covers Operation Blue and the Stalingrad campaign. If you need to catch up, you can go to the series list, where the most recent articles are listed first.] It has […]
Break down, go ahead and give it to me
I’m not quite sure exactly what it is about wargames that befuddles people. Something about NATO symbology* which translates armored units into rectangles with ovals in them. Or hexagons. I know some people don’t like hexagons. Although Neuroshima Hex has those as well, and it does all right. I think the biggest obstacle to playing […]
Chess piece face
By now we’re at the fourth installment in this new War in the East series, and you’re probably wondering if I’m ever going to attack another hex, or if I’m going to just keep going to my closet and pulling out different games about Stalingrad. I assure you that both of those things are definitely […]
A question of scale
Before we can get to the fight for Stalingrad or whatnot, there is the small question of Sevastopol. This naval base on the Crimean peninsula, famous as the site of the focus of the Crimean War in 1855, was the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet in 1941 and stood as a fortress through […]
Fellowship of the panzer
When you start watching The Two Towers, you get a little reminder of important stuff that happened earlier, like the wizard who fell off the bridge fighting the flaming minotaur. It’s an integral part of the Lord of the Rings, because the mistakes made earlier in the story lead to the choices available to the […]
War in the East: weird twilight
It was often said in the Stalingrad pocket that it was better to have a cousin in the Luftwaffe than a Father in Heaven. -–Heinz Schroter Seventy years ago this month, in a place between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Soviet Red Army broke through the front lines of the Germans and their Italian, […]
Reckoning in the east
534:366 = Soviet Minor Victory Uh-oh. Let’s take a look at how I did compared to the historical result: Army Group South: I captured Kiev in August without the diversion of panzer forces from Army Group Center, which is more than can be said for Field Marshal von Rundstedt, who took it in September with […]
Dreaming of a Red Christmas
Snow! Colonel-General Guderian was near Teploie on the night of November 3-4, 1941, where the day before, the leading infantry elements of LIII Corps had run into a large Russian force comprised of two cavalry divisions, five rifle divisions, and a tank brigade. The Russians were able to make some progress thanks to the mobility […]
I shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather
Mud! Every game about the invasion of Russia includes the rasputitsa, the name for the spring and autumn muddy season when rain or the spring thaw renders the roads impassable. Something I didn’t know until I looked it up for this article is that there is a corresponding Finnish word, rospuutto, which translates to “roadlessness”. […]
Is Taifun the movie with those giant robots?
2011 is the 70th anniversary of the launching of the final German drive on Moscow, Operation Typhoon (in German: Taifun). And it’s the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Russia itself, obviously. Don’t bogart my point, which is that this game diary entry is about Operation Typhoon. It’s probably one of the most significant battles […]
© 2024 Wargame_[space]. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 
Recent Comments