[Elias Nordling]

Skriver småspelsartikel till Battles Magazine igen. Spelar vykortsspel. Här är ett utdrag ur min artikel, om Rattenkrieg:

Rattenkrieg is a solitaire game about the German assault on the Tractor Works during the battle of Stalingrad. For a change, it is not a promotional game for Against the Odds, but for the eternally upcoming game brand Turning Point Simulations. Designer Tom cunliffe has previously designed The Hell of Stalingrad for Clash of Arms, and while I haven't played that game myself, I get the impression it shares some of the basic concepts of this bigger game.

So it's Stalingrad, you know the deal. The Germans have to defeat dug in Soviets in brutal attrition combat, city block by city block, while guarding against infiltration from newly arriving units. The latter is actually the first thing happening in the game turn, and perhaps the most interesting mechanic in the game. You pull a soviet unit at random from the reinforcement pool and then roll two dice to find out which area the unit appears. If the area already contains Soviet or German units, the reinforcement doesn't enter. Of course, 2d6 doesn't provide an equal distribution, so areas 6, 7 and 8 are much more likely to receive reinforcements than areas 2 and 12.

This is obviously a deliberate design decision, and one that provides some interesting game decisions. As the Germans, you'd like to prevent those reinforcements from arriving, so you want to garrison the areas where the enemy is most likely to appear, but this has to be weighed against the need to use your units in combat. You definitely don't have enough units to do everything, so how much of a calculated risk do you take?

Speaking of reinforcement pool, the rules have a number of holes due to sloppy use of vocabulary. Units are used as term for German leaders, suggesting they can be used to garrison areas. Somehow I doubt it. Also, the reinforcement pool is never defined, so do eliminated units go back into it? The answer to this question makes the difference between a pretty limited and an infinite Soviet force pool. The answer is eliminated units are out of the game, so the threat of infiltrating soviets isn't as bad as it seems, the Germans can very well win by defeating all the Soviet units, taking the sting out of the game decisions around the infiltration mechanic. It is hard to write rules the size of a postcard perfectly clear, but here the simple expedient of stringent use of vocabulary would have solved the problem.

I also find the use of color on the German counters confusing. White on one side and light feldgrau on the other doesn't do a great job at signaling back or front and most but not all units have the same values back and front too. But hey, it wouldn't be an LPS game if the counters were ergonomical. German units have full and reduced strength, Soviets hidden and revealed.

Movement in the game is pretty standard. German units can move one or two areas depending on type. The one piece of chrome is the troop carrier unit that can carry an infantry unit two areas. There are limitations to exiting an area with an enemy unit, but frankly I never felt I had to worry about that. Stacking is two German units and a leader. Due to the mechanics, there will never be more than one Soviet unit in an area.

Combat starts with the Soviet unit in the area being revealed. It can be one of two snipers, in which case any German leader in the area is eliminated, and then the sniper is removed and combat ends. Or it is a real combat unit with a strength from 0 to 2. In addition, the unit can have an A which means an ambush, immediately reduce one German unit one step. Germans have combat strengths of 1-2. In addition, the area of combat adds a varying number to the defending unit.
To resolve combat, compare the strength of the attacker and the defender. The side with higher strength gets to roll two dice, the other one die. In a tie, both roll two dice. The Germans can add one of four air points for an additional die. Highest die roll, or most of the highest rolls, win. Leaders cause the Germans to win ties. If the Germans win the Soviet unit is removed, otherwise it remains, but regardless, the Germans lose a step. Thus the Germans are guaranteed to take a steady stream of losses in a nearly deterministic way.

The game continues an indeterminate number of turns, until either all Soviet units are eliminated, in which case the Germans win, or the Soviets have more units on the map than the Germans, in which case they lose.

So what do I think? Well, to start with the most obvious problem with game, I've won every single game I've played. Being too easy is the most fatal fault a solitaire game can have, in my opinion. You want a solitaire game to be a challenge to return to again and again, to hone your skills and improve. There isn't much sport in trying to do significantly worse than last time, however.

The first time I played I really tried to optimize play to reduce the number of Soviet units as fast as possible and try to keep reinforcements out by garrisoning areas. In a later game I was unlucky and the Soviets got all their reinforcements, and I discovered I would still comfortably defeat them. Thus the one intriguing game decision proved to be kind of pointless. I say the one, because otherwise you are basically just trying to get the most number of combat points into the most number of enemy zones each turn. If you screw up, there are always the air points to save you.

Neither do I find anything in the mechanics to capture me. Sure, it makes a good job in illustrating the attritional feel of city fighting. If anything it does a too good job, since the only real variable is the number of lost combats. My games ended more or less with the same amount of German losses. Despite the hidden, random Soviet units, the system thus fails to provide any surprises or unexpected turn of events to the players. Sure, there are the snipers, but those mostly make the player happy as he gets to take the area without a fight.

Stalingrad is a story about desperate attritional combat. Rattenkrieg provides all of the attrition without any of the desperation. Without emotional commitment, attrition is just tiresome. Maybe the game would have been better if done from the Soviet perspective, after all?

[BigPapaBear]

Bra artikel!  

[Nisse]

Instämmer med Elias. Jag har spelat fyra partier och vunnit alla fyra utan allt för mycket besvär. Det blev liksom "mekaniskt" rätt kvickt när man kommit på hur man skall/bör/kan spela.