MEK OP Games Night: WiF Barbarossa

This weekend I set up the new World in Flames game for the first time, using newly laminated maps and my rather limited set of game counter magnets. I took the Russians, with the intent of letting the German player run through the initial super-combined move (via offensive chit) as a teaching tool. This effectively creates a turn impulse in which virtually every possible action that can occur, does occur.

In some ways, pitting an inexperienced attacker versus an experienced defender doesn't do a great job of showcasing the system. For example, the primary power of the German Wehrmacht is in being able to quickly blitz through clear terrain and envelope enemy formations. But a clever Russian defender will simply set up in ways that place absolutely all the units in hexes with unfavorable terrain for blitzkrieg, forcing the Germans into making direct assaults with minimal penetration. Even with some decent rolls in the opening turn, the Germans were unable to obtain any exploitation results off the combat table, since all the vulnerable Russian units were set up in forests and cities.

Here was the situation at the end of the first impulse:

Army Group Centre has blown a hole through the line south of the Pripet Marshes that I'll need to repair, and the Rumanians have killed a quality MECH corps, but otherwise the Germans have only been able to blast away a few perimeter defenders.

After another Axis impulse, the gap is still filled with a stopgap that should take a couple more impulses to clear, and every other Axis formation is disorganized and out of commission until July.

The Germans have eliminated Timoshenko's HQ, at the cost of flipping. Some reserves are waiting to move forward and the Russians are probably going to fall back toward Kiev to shorten the line against a couple new German corps that have railed in to rescue Rumania.

At this point we quit. Casualties were relatively even on both sides:

Incidentally, both sides were understrength relative to a normal invasion due to some of my misunderstanding of the rules. The idea of calling out "reserves" is a new development since the 5th edition, and works differently for major powers and minor countries. For a minor country, they work more like normal production, although they build for free. For major powers, the materialize on the map instantly after a declaration of war, but just suffer disorganization. So the Russians should have gotten all their reserves immediately, giving them a lot more defenders.

On the other hand, I neglected to mention that the Germans could align the doughty Finns (and comic-relief Hungarians), which would have given the Germans an even larger number of additional units than the Russians were missing. This let me avoid setting up anything along the Finnish border. So everything roughly balanced out!