Beholder's Lair: Catastrophic losses suffered by the Russian Red Army in the east

Besides miniature gaming, I also play boardgames of various genres. When it comes to non-miniature wargaming I'm part of a group that meets once a year for a weekend long game of EastFront II or sometimes EuroFront (block wargames from Columbia Games), and also play other games every now and then (There's copies - singles and multiples of - of atleast EastFront, Westfront, EuroFront, Julius Caesar, Rommel in the Desert, Here I Stand, Sekigahara, Pacific Victory and Twilight Struggle, and if I remember correctly Bobby Lee and Hammer of the Scots in the group. Personally I have EastFront and Julius Caesar and am waiting for my copy from the recent Pacific Victory 2nd edition kickstarter). I've been part of the group for about four years, but the rest of the group has been at it for much longer, the core members for over a decade. "What makes this event special?", you may ask. Well those of you who have played EastFront know (and those who have played wargames in general can reasonably guess) that it is a two player game. Except it's not when we play it. In our games there is usually two teams (Germany and Soviets) of 4-5 players each, and 1-3 judges. Each team has the HQ (Supreme commander and Chief of staff assisting him) and 2-3 frontline commanders (usually 3), each commanding one of three separate fronts (Northern, Central and Southern). Each front and both HQs are located in separate rooms to make sure no information bleeds from one front to another unintentionally. Judges take care of the game running smoothly.

Front locations this year. Pohjoinen is north, keskinen is centre and eteläinen is south. Dacha is soviet hq and bunker is german hq. Upstairs blueprint is incorrect on the room placement (it was done from memory before the game).

Once every month (every other game turn), before production is assigned there is 15 minutes long negotiation period held at the team HQs. These negotiations are the only times when every player in a team are in the same room and can communicate freely. Other times communications are done by messages between fronts or between HQ and a front, but these messages have a chance to get lost or being intercepted by the enemy. Here is a link to 8-player version of the multiplayer rules, put together by a couple of the guys in our group and shared by a third one.

This year the scenario we played was Winter '43 (starting in December '43) (likely to be taken out of rotation for a while as it's been played several times in the last few years). I was playing the Chief of Staff on the Soviet side. Our plan was to push through north and south of the marshes between Kiev and Minsk. At first this worked resonably well even though we lost our southern Panzer army which meant putting all of our proverbial eggs (armoured eggs travelling on tracks, that is) in one basket so to speak. This again worked fairly well (we were mostly ahead of the Soviets' historical advance) until March '44 when disaster struck. The German team managed a brialliant coup (aided in no small part by the weather going completely their way, but brilliant nonetheless) and succeeded in a counter attack that saw about third of our army (includingin three Headquarter units - that is, whopping half of them - and practically all of our attack units) first encircled and then destroyed.

Rough outline of the situation before the Disaster of March

Line stabilised in early summer

It took us the rest of the spring and start of summer to stabilise our lines and start building new attack forces, but we ran out of time and the game ended in a decisive victory for the axis. The rules describes this as a victory of the magnitude to almost certainly guarantee victory in the war (Altough, realistically I'm not sure even such a coup would've been enough to save the Third Reich at that point. It would've likely meant that less of central and eastern european countries would've fallen under soviet occupation after the war though.).