From: Markus Stumptner Subject: Guderian's Gambit mini-review Met with a friend yesterday intending to try The Gamers' Burma, but found out in setup that my newly arrived copy was missing a map. So we postponed Burma until a replacement arrives (actually, I may be playing it on Thursday with a friend's copy - Burma copies are fairly numerous around here) and dug out some older, unplayed games. We ended up playing Command's _The Moscow Option: Guderian's Gambit_, one of the fog-of-war oriented, roster sheet series originated by John Desch and continued by Ty Bomba. The game assumes that the Germans did not focus on their great envelopment at Kiev in summer 1941 but instead went for Moscow. The map covers an area roughly from Smolensk to Moscow, with Rzhev near the northern edge. It's surrounded by a "gold row" similar to the "green row" in Gazala, only here it's the Russians who own it, meaning that by bringing in replacements they can at any time threaten the base of the salient. However, that's going to be defended pretty well since there's a lot of German infantry that will never reach Moscow anyway. This series is pretty heavy on design for effet (no problem for me), but TMO:GG is interesting because it's pretty much the most extreme in that regard. The German supply situation is assumed to provide only the mechanized units with full supply, so German infantry divisions have a movement rate of 1 and can never attack. Germans have the sequence mech move-combat-move. The Soviets are not burdened with a fight-move sequence (Zhukov somewhere around), but all their units are one-steppers and untried (everything available was thrown into the path of the offensive). So only the Germans have roster sheets here. Once turned right side up, the Soviet units remain that way, which proved very helpful for the Germans in surgically removing the most dangerous units. The slow infantry means that in mid-game a large gap will open between the mechanized spearhead and these units which the Germans have to patrol by leaving mechanized units behind so the Soviet won't bring reinforcements in from the gold row to cut the vital Minsk-Moscow highway running the length of the map (the only supply route for the Germans). The CRT is also less radical than in the earlier games, with a fair chance of a successful attacker not losing anything at higher odds, and attacker-friendly enough to suggest local counterattacks by the Soviets as a useful tactic. We had to stop our game before the end but the outskirts of Moscow had been reached at half time with a severely weakened Soviet force around and only moderate attrition to the Germans, mostly due to a successful major pocket between Smolensk and Vyazma that helped the Germans to zip through the central woods area almost without slowing down since Soviet forces there were so thinly spread. So chances were it would be a German victory. The Soviets are never completely out of the game though since there is a steady stream of reinforcements. These look like an awful mass to the German at first (who gets none) but are still quite insufficient to offset the enormous rate of attrition (seven to eight units per turn on average in our game). The interesting phase (that we did not get to) is that the Soviet collapse is governed by dieroll each turn depending on how many Moscow hexes are taken and how late in the game it is. So it is possible to crush the Soviet army and still lose if you don't roll high enough. I assume this means the game is balanced in the theoretical sense, as there is always some chance for the Germans to lose, but it remains to be seen how satisfactory it is in play. It will certainly keep both players on their toes till the end. Summing it up: nice game, trivial to learn for those who know Gazala or Budapest '45. Not quite in the realm of either IMO due to the dierolling victory, but still quite tense. Activity is more one-sided than in the other games despite a need for the Soviet to counterattack vulnerable German units. Will be played again though I think. And it fired up my interest to try the other game in that issue (the first [the only?] to use the roster sheets in a different era): Mukden. Markus Last 3 games: Objective Schmidt, Hunters from the Sky, Guderian's Gambit ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Bakayaro! Bakayaro!" ("Stupid Bastards! Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942