Four Roads to Moscow, included in the Against the Odds Annual Edition for 2010, is comprised of four game modules in one package. Each is designed by a veteran game designer and each deals with the German advance on Moscow during World War II. In this article, veteran game designer Lou Coatney takes a look at the maps and orders of battle for each of the four games...
At great personal financial cost (for minimum-pension me), I got a copy of Four Roads to Moscow. The competing/comparative designs concept and packaging are fascinating, and I thank Andy Loakes for getting it to me, even with Paul Rohrbaugh's neat link between John Prados's pre-invasion game and the others.
All the components are *beautifully* rendered graphically. However, I have some concerns about the maps and orders of battle (as usual) so far, that Andy Nunez might want to consider for the future.
Roger Nord's game Strike the Bear has an ingeniously innovative octagonal grid with squares in the gaps on its map, by Randy Lein, but the rivers and lakes (which do have terrain effects) squirt all over the mapboard oblivious to the grid (bringing back nightmares of trying to figure where rivers were in the ancient classic "Fall of Dunkirk").
Ted Raicer's game Hitler Turns East - mapmaker Randy Lein again - has the Dvina river not touching the Gulf of Riga at all, at Riga, but flowing *east* from east of there! (Some here may remember me questioning Ted not having a Baranovichi-to-Bobruisk line in his point-to-point "Barbarossa to Berlin", but this is pretty strange. Didn't Ted get a chance to proof the map? Was it a publication deadline casualty? Trying to get all 4 games finished and packaged together at all was a remarkable feat for Against the Odds.
And Dvinsk seems too far north. Before I try Ted's game, I'm going to make some corrections for my copy, and I'd be willing to share those with Andy, if he wants me to. (I keep saying that for a free copy of a corps level or above Russian Front game, I would be happy to look over the mapsheet, to see if there are any corrections I could suggest, but...)
Mike Rinella's game Slaughterhouse is a point-to-point movement game. Terrain is only a general consideration - points in rough terrain or the Pripet marshes have an effect, but those are easy to see since the route selections or grades themselves can resolve such considerations. However, it lacks many obvious connections. I assume Mike's reason for the early connections from the border not being laterally linked (like Riga and Dvinsk aren't) is because each army (group) was supposed to have its own exclusive route of advance, but lateral shifts of units *were* made by both sides, and players should be able to make them. Another (of many possible) example(s) is the lack of a connection between Vichniy Volochek and Novgorod, which would complete the historically important most direct route between Moscow and Leningrad. Novgorod, Demyansk, and Velikiye Luki seem too far north. Even with point to point, it is important to keep relative locations accurate. And I'm not talking about the original East Front Solitaire's points running so far afield of their placenames. ☺
Of course, John Prados' typically creative Codeword: Barbarossa about the strategic runup to Barbarossa is the real prize. It is classic old Avalon Hill "Origins of World War 2" with lots of historical event cards and real strategic creation and shifting of military forces. Threats vs. bluffs or, as happened historically, threats which disastrously turned out to be bluffs. シ "Origins of Barbarossa" could be another title for it. ☺
Brandon Pennington did this area map too, and it looks very appropriately functional, although I do wonder if that long north-south area east of Lake Chud/Peipus should be there. (Maybe it was spawned from playtesting?) And I really like seeing Transylvania in BLACK. Maybe that could use a barely perceptible figure in its shadows. ☺
As to a preliminary impression of the games' orders of battle, I should describe what my research leads me to think are the stronger vs. weaker 22-Jun-41 units. For the German field/infantry armies, 4th and 18th were strong. 6th started weak but grew strong. For the panzer groups, Guderian's 2nd PzGp started the strongest both in equipment and (his) initiative, followed by 3rd, 1st, and 4th in that order. At the panzer korps level, Guderian's go-to 24th, Hoepner/3rd's 39th, and Hoth/4th's 41st were strong, although in the latter case, von Manstein's 56th made up for material weakness with his bridge-grabbing dash.
As to the Russians, strong frontier "combined arms" armies were 8th, 11th, 10th, and 23rd, followed closely by 5th, 6th, 9th (depending on whether or not the 18th is subtracted from it), and 12th. For the Battle of Moscow, Rokossovsky would be in command of 16th which was back in the Reserve echelon on 22-Jun-41, so it could be made strong for the later game too. As to the slow 1941 mech corps, the strongest were 1st (Len), 3rd (Balt), 4th(! Kiev), 6th (West), 7th(! back in Reserve near Vyazma), 8th (Kiev), and 15th (Kiev), followed by 5th (Reserve), 10th (Len), 11th (West), 12th (Balt), and 14th (West), with the others up through the 25th variously weak. (Glantz Initial Period of War and Krupchenko Sovetski Tankoviye Voiska. By the way, I got a free copy of GDW's "Fire in the East", thanks to my help with the Russian mexkors' strengths and locations... although why 12th was still made stronger than 3rd ...?)
Strike the Bear is at army level with corps breakdowns and independent Russian mechanized corps. For the Germans, 4th, 9th, 16th, and 18th armies are the strongest, but there is no 2nd Army at all. The panzer groups vary slightly in strength, historically. For the Russians, 10th, 23rd, and 26th(?) are strong armies. 3rd is the only strongest mexkor and is shown as pure armor rather than mechanized like the others.
Ted's Hitler Turns East has all-equal/uniform strengths for German field armies and panzer korps, although those may be at varying 22-Jun-41 step-reduction strengths? For the Russians, army strengths are consistent with history, as I have described. However, Ted has grouped the mexkors into pairs as was done for GDW's old Series 120 "1941: Operation Barbarossa", and as in that case some of the groupings are not logical and also all of them have an un-reduceable strength of 2 (vs. the standard pzkps 4). But 7th MexKor alone is a whopping 4 all by itself, although still having the 4-x army/group unit level marking. (Its 1st Moscow Motorized Rifle Division was a showpiece unit, but ....) There is also the 1st Guards Cavalry *Army* - Budyonny's KonArmiya? ☺ - and a west-facing 1-factor "free radical" T-34 unit with the only icon besides air/StuKA units (which are all diving *from the east*, oddly) in the games.
Mike Rinella has all 8 field armies and all 4 panzer groups for the Germans. As well, there are *9* Security divisions (to deal with the 1 Russian Partisan unit, apparently,. ☺) For the Russians, Mike has 11 front - army group xxxxx - units, some geographically referenced armies, and 4 shock armies like Ted's (but not Roger's) game does.
John's Codeword Barbarossa "pregame" has 10 of the 11 German panzerkorps, but an Afrika Korps unit instead of the 40th. He appears to have the starting infantry and mountain korps. Unlike the other games, he has no Axis allies. Like all the other games, he has a German parachute korps. For the Russians, he has all 23 of the 22-Jun-41 armies - even 7th and 14th which were facing Finland north of Leningrad - no less than 24 mexkors, a parachute korps, and the 6th (Cossack) KavKor. There is a "reinforced" backside of the units, as well as fortification( marker)s which apparently can be built and then dismantled to be rebuilt in more strategically advantageous locations, unless caught by surprise under construction, presumably. Fascinating.
Such is my initial survey of Four Roads to Moscow's contents. As to whether I play them, I don't know.
At the army- front level, I think my free little German Eagle vs. Russian Bear wins. For a standard corps-army level hex-and-counter game, my free War Against Russia (WAR) wins, and for overall excitement of play, my free 9-hex-warsaw-to-moscow lotsa dice Darkest Crusade can't be beat.
... in all modesty. ☺
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