As usual, while down visiting my parents, I’m getting in some gaming with my dad. Among other things, I brought down my two East Front System games, mostly because my dad has a large gaming table, it was the only way I’d ever see all five maps from the two games set up at once. Actually, it turned out to be a closer fit than I thought it would be. There’s some room to the north in the setup we did. If we went the other way (which would get some east-west room), just adding Crimea made it too tall.
At any rate, while I figured my dad would be interested in the series, he showed more interest than I thought he would (I figured that he wouldn’t care too much for something built around really big scenarios). So, EFS became the first thing to look at.
We started with scenario #1 from Crimea: The Tartar Ditch. I ran him through the basics of the rules, and then the walkthrough of the first turn’s combat as shown in the playbook. We continued from there, with him volunteering to be the Soviets (surprisingly). I have yet to see the Germans win that scenario, and this didn’t break that streak. I consider it pretty close to impossible with the given first turn in the rulebook, as that will almost invariably end with the Germans having to make attacks on both hexes of the second defense line with the no Attack Supply penalty. It ended that way this time, but one attack actually rolled well, and the Germans did take one of the two hexes, leaving them just short of victory, as usual.
The next thing we did was actually go through Assault on Rostov example of play on an (I guess, the) EFS fan site. It’s a pretty good intro to the system, but I was able to point out a few places where the rules have changed since Army Group South, which the example was written for.
After that, we played scenario #1 from Kiev to Rostov: Rostov Redeemed (I specially punched the counters for this, since I only got the set a week before, and hadn’t had a chance to start punching and clipping the counters). Like The Tartar Ditch, it’s simple little scenario presented on one 8.5″x11″ card. (Actually, The Tartar Ditch uses an 11″x17″ card when you include the OB and turn track; Rostov Redeemed has all of that in the same little area as the map.) It shows the area near Rostov, being held by the Germans with a couple of reduced divisions and a small SS division (the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler). The Soviets are counterattacking to retake Rostov, and activity off the map is putting the Germans out of supply. It’s only 2 1/2 turns long (starting with the Soviet half of the first turn), and it is interesting to see a real Soviet offensive.
My dad took the Soviets again, and in a hard-fought campaign only managed a Axis Marginal victory. There’s four victory locations, and he only took one of them, all his attacks on Rostov failing. Part of the reason for this was Mud on the second turn. Even with reduced movement for being out of supply, the Germans managed to get where they really needed to, while the mud stalled some of the advance (and the extra defensive bonus for towns helped). Normally, he probably should have taken one hex of Rostov on the final turn (which would have generated the historical Soviet Operational Victory), but both his attacks rolled poorly, and failed (narrowly!) to dislodge the German defenders.
This points up the problem with the really small scenarios: They’re so short and tightly timed, that one missed attack roll generally sends the attacker so off schedule that he can’t recover momentum before the scenario ends. That said, so far they tend to be nicely tense little affairs, and I really need to try The Battle of Sumy in KtR and scenarios 6-9 in Crimea (which I believe use the full supply rules, which have been lacking in the ones I’ve played so far).
