RUSSIA: THE SOVIET-GERMAN WAR presents the war on the Eastern Front, from its beginning in 1941 until the end in 1945, in five modules. By the series’ completion, its ten maps, scaled at 10 miles per hex, will cover the area east to west from Moscow to Warsaw and north to south from southern Finland to Grozny.
The first three modules—entitled MOSCOW, STALINGRAD, and LENINGRAD respectively, all contain a variety of scenarios beginning in late 1941, with the fourth module, BARBAROSSA, adding the final maps and beginning the war from the jump-off date of June 22, 1941. Module #5 completes the series with a set of campaign and optional rules.
RUSSIA has several highly specific design goals, all of which will be kept firmly in mind as the modules in the series are under development.
1. The emphasis on the entire series will be on playability—and we mean that. To this end, we will always be willing, during development, to chop out detail that impedes the speed of play—and we are focusing on the major defining elements of each campaign rather than the tiny details. In addition, the game will do everything possible not only to eliminate large stacks, but to provide hexes large enough to provide for comfortable counter placement.
2. Play will alternate quickly between the two sides. Not only will interactivity occur while each player is conducting his moves, this is not a game in which one player moves all his units and then the other player does. Instead, play will switch constantly from one player to the other, and the game system is being designed from the ground up to eliminate downtime.
3. The complexity rating of the modules will never rise above a rating of 5, and even with the campaign module will not rise above 6. This is a promise. These ratings assume that EFS and OCS have complexity ratings of 8 (as a point of comparison).
4. The game will make it impossible, at the strategic level, for the Soviet player to simply run away from the German army. Drawing from the research in David Glantz’s series of studies of the war, the RUSSIA series forces the Soviet player to think in terms of frequent—even continual—attacks, beginning very early after the initial attack. The Soviet player can ignore this requirement, but if he does his “War Experience” (as the system is known) will never increase, and he cannot win the game. The Soviet player must learn that victory in battle means something much different for him than it does for the German, and the that he must be aggressive in attack from the earliest days of the war.
5. The system will provide a variety of ways for each player to win, but also a number of ways for players to lose. Juggling one against the other will provide a constant challenge.
The first module of RUSSIA will ship in May of 2009, with each additional module appearing at roughly one-year intervals. We plan to unveil the campaign module at Monstercon in 2013.
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