Starting Off the New Year with a Bang!: Ukraine '43

Well, that was vastly frustrating. I'd written up a long, detailed post on the playing that my friend Mr Invisible and I had started recently of GMT's Ukraine '43. Than I mis-keyed and deleted the whole damn thing.

*sigh*

We took advantage of a brief lull in his work-related travel schedule to get a coupel of games in. I've mentioned our playing of Rebel Raiders. The second GMT title we broke out was Ukraine '43. I'd owned the first edition for some time without playing it; he had recently gotten the second edition, so that was the one we set up.

Having set up and played through the opening of sister-game Normandy '44, I had some familiarity with some of the concepts common to these games: multiple flavours of movement (normal, extended, Tactical, Strategic), ZOC bonds, combat shifts, disruption, determined defense... But there is something new in each of these titles, always something that makes the specific campaign different (plus Mr Simonitch keeps refining the system).

Our set up. (Morning coffee giving way to afternoon beer.)

Having read a lot of the comments on BGG, I was expecting to have a very bloody game on my hands as the Soviet player. Perhaps I was merely too cautious, but I never had huge Red Army dead piles. But I also didn't see the huge breakthroughs that I've seen described. The Germans in the hills east of Stalino were too tough for serious attacks given what I had there, though a better setup once I sussed the game better might have helped. North of Stalino the river line was like adamant--no way I was going to penetrate that! I finally got some traction through the woods and rivers east of Kharkov after several turns, but only after pulling off most of my mechanized troops from the fronts south of there.

The Soviet steamroller lumbers into action.

I did manage to create some holes in the German line north and west of Kharkov, seizing a couple of VP in the process. But he was able to pull his own mech forces north and, with the aid of the horrifying Gross Deutschland mechanized division, he was putting together a defense that stood a good chance to contain my forces unless I came up with some magic.

Killing units is remarkably hard in this game. Time and again, I was able to surround units, either partly or fully, only to see them hang on stubbornly against my attacks until their friends were able to break through to them. Even boxing a unit up with ZOC bonds wasn't enough to cut it off and destroy it utterly in most cases. With armour shifts and more airpower and elite force bonuses, he broke though time and time again and pulled his metaphorical chestnuts out of the figurative fire.

We played only the first three (or was it four?) turns of the scenario's seven before we had to call it a day. But I do look forward to a rematch and to playing more of the related games from Mr Simonitch's stable.

Zhukov begins making holes, but too few and too small.