Wintergewitter

Beginning

The opening sheet offers three ways in.

• Fight the campaign. Five to seven linked actions between the Aksay and the Myshkova, scored as one advance in kilometres. Start at the Aksay on 12 December, or take the Pokhlebin prologue of 3 December first — it teaches the rules against cavalry and is worth six kilometres of confidence.
• A single action. Any one of the seven, fought on its own.
• Watch both. The machine plays both sides. Useful for learning what the ground does to an attack.

Choose your side and the standard of the opposition — cadet, veteran or ace — before you begin. The German side attacks in most actions; the Soviet side has more of everything and better tanks.

The scale

Controls

Turn order

1. Reinforcements march on. Batteries are replenished.
2. Both sides roll for the initiative. The winner activates first.
3. The sides alternate, activating one formation at a time, until every formation has acted. If one side runs out first, the other finishes the turn alone — so keeping a battalion in hand is worth something.
4. On activation, suppressed stands in that formation try to rally, then each stand may move, fire, or stand overwatch.

Movement

Choose Move and the ground your stand can reach is shaded. Hovering any of it traces the exact route hex by hex and quotes what it costs against the allowance. Hexes ringed in brown may bog a vehicle; hexes ringed in red are covered by an enemy standing overwatch.

Moving next to an enemy stand stops the move dead. Infantry and guns may mount lorries, halftracks or limbers and ride; a gun with no transport does not move at all.

Firing

Choose Fire and every enemy you can engage is ringed. The card tells you the odds before you commit.

1. Throw dice equal to the stand's rate of fire. Each die of the target number or better is a hit.
2. The target number starts at 6 and is moved by range band, cover, whether the firer moved, whether it is suppressed, and the quality of the crews.
3. Against armour, each hit is compared: penetration against the armour that was actually struck. The front arc is the vehicle's forward three hexsides; anything else strikes the flank.
4. Against troops, hits force a quality check. Failing it removes the stand.

Overwatch

A stand that neither moves nor fires may stand overwatch and shoot at the enemy while he moves, before he can reply. It is how a defence is held with too few men, and how an attack is bled without ever taking a turn.

Artillery

Off-board batteries are called by the button in the orders panel, then by clicking the ground. Somebody must be able to see it, and the rounds are not always available. Smoke blocks the view for a turn — the cheapest way to cross open ground in front of a gun line.

When a formation has had enough

A formation that loses two thirds of its stands tests, and if it fails it leaves the field with whatever it has left. Fought-out battalions do not have to be destroyed to be beaten.

Winning an action

Each action lists its objectives and what they are worth. Holding ground counts for three times its face value; wrecking the enemy counts for what the wrecks are worth. The margin between the two sides is read against thresholds calibrated from tens of thousands of machine-played games, so that a historical result — a German tactical win that is not decisive enough — is the median outcome.

Winning the campaign

The advance ribbon down the right of the map is the whole campaign in one column: the road north from Kotelnikovo, your leading elements climbing it, and 2nd Guards Army as the red shadow coming down to meet you. Ninety-five kilometres puts you across the Myshkova in time.

Between actions you will sometimes be asked to decide something the real commanders decided — whether to commit refitting panzers to save a bridgehead, knowing they will not be fresh tomorrow. What each action costs you carries into the next morning as fewer runners.

A decisive result at Verkhne-Kumsky frees your flank and removes the bridgehead action from the campaign altogether. Losing badly on 15 December can end the drive short of the river.

Losing

The campaign is not lost by having your division destroyed — it is lost by arriving late. Falling short of ninety-five kilometres by the last action means 2nd Guards Army is in position, and the corridor is never opened. That is what happened.

Saving and restarting

The position is saved in your browser as you play, and the opening sheet offers Resume when a saved game exists. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is downloaded. Choosing Menu saves and returns to the opening sheet; finishing a campaign clears the save.

Reading a counter

Wintergewitter 1.0.0 — Tronsoft Games — see the manual for the full rules