Chris Fawcett - Feb 23, 2009 10:03 am (#595 Total: 635) "I've spent most of my life gaming...the rest of it I've just wasted." I have played it just once, this past Saturday. We started around 1:30 and ended the game (finished that is, after turn 22) at about 7:30. This was my first play, and Steve's second. Mike had played Steve previously and had done a couple of solo efforts, and so was our resident expert. I played the Soviets, with Steve across the table and Mike providing the experienced rules consultant/teacher for this learning game. The game started off pretty well, and the Germans plowed through the defending fronts with little effort, but most of the initial attacks produced DS and DR results rather than DDs. Thus I was always able to rebuild some semblance of a line each turn and the Germans never really broke through. It turned into a real slugfest (with me doing most of the getting slugged, though I gave Steve a backhand every now and then. He kept dissolving my line, and kept on managing to rebuild it until early '43, when the Germans took Moscow with three panzer armies (too late for the High Tide VPs, though). Sadly for him, I knifed back through his lines and with a deep envelopment cut them all off and made it so he couldn't get them back into supply. This, of course, was the turning point, and it was just a matter of time before I was able to push every German back off the map, take out Romania, and knock out Finland for something like a 10- to 12-point margin of victory. As for the game itself, allow this bit of a preface in the interests of transparency: I am sucker for wargames in which both players feel they are on the knife's edge of victory or defeat. In this regard, NR provided an excellent gaming experience. The sudden death victory mechanic always seems to provide or enhance a game's sense of urgency for its players, and NR is no exception. On every turn, both Steve and I though we were losing badly, or that we might be able to pull it out with just one more good battle result. Tension was high, and we both felt in a flow while playing We skipped lunch and dinner, and we even had somewhat of a crowd of interested bystanders. The game also seemed to work well as history, as the veteran Axis forces bashed the novice Soviets around at will, but as the Red Army slowly learned the art of war (the upgrade idea was brilliant, simply simply brilliant) and as the Germans became attrited the tide began to turn and the race for Moscow became the race for Berlin. I'm generally not a fan of the CDG genre for a couple of reasons, partially because they pervert the historical timeline into a series of random events that in many cases could not have occurred in any sequence other than the one they occurred in. CDG designers seem to think nothing of the butterfly effect and thus CDGs leave me cold. The cards in NR didn't drive the game, though, they enhanced it (a CEG, perhaps?), and in this regard, became a perfect subsystem to the core game. They added to the tension by providing the painful surprise at just the wrong time, or the means to rescue a unit or speed up reorganization at just the right time. Good use of the medium without letting it "own" the rest of the game. Thank you for that, Carl. All in all, this game provided an excellent feel for the Russo-German War, and the scale just seemed to work. The game components were quite good, and it definitely doesn't feel like a DTP game at all, correcting some of my early first impressions of VPG titles. I'm a fan of the DTP genre, BTW, and I often encounter great quality in that "arts & crafts" format. This is a professional game produced for players. Did I miss anything?