Ukraine '43
Mark Simonitch is a designer/developer/graphics
guy who I hugely respect, but unfortunately his Ukraine '43 has sat on my shelf
now for some 3 years as I've tried to find a chance to play. It has resisted all
the rather drastic wargame purges of the past few years, and today I was glad it
had when Charles game by and I finally had a chance to play scenario
3.
What I think got me the most was how
clean the game is. One reason it has been tottering on the brink has been that
it has 20 pages of rules, which for me is an awful lot. Once you sit down and
play it though, Ukraine '43 feels like a 12-pager. I've become so used to games
from GMT which feel more complicated than the page count (perhaps because the
only way to get down to that page count is to leave out all the errata they have
to eventually publish). Ukraine '43 is a really clean system, the rules are
amazingly eratta-free, and it plays well. One of Mark Simonitch's great traits
is the fact that his games are comparatively focussed, with that focus being on
real, high-level decisions, with peripheral stuff
streamlined.
Like most of these games,
the real meat is in the allocation of a handful of very powerful units - the
artillery, breakthrough artillery, sappers, and armor for the Soviets, and the
Panzer Divisions for the Germans. So the fact that the game is big is not as
daunting as the raw counter density might indicate, and you concentrate more on
the big decisions than the micromanagement as is usually the case with these
bigger games.
I also really like the
"magnitude" combat system, where the bloodiness of combat is proportional to the
number of units involved. This is a technique that a
lot
of games could use, OCS not the
least.
As I become more and more jaded
after playing serious games for some 20+ years, it's always a real treat to
discover a great, new, engaging game, and now I've had the privilege of finding
two in the last two weeks - Ukraine '43 and Lock 'n Load. This is almost as many
as the whole last year, at least on the wargame side. Great stuff.
Posted: Saturday - October 25, 2003 at 07:31 PM