Defiant Russia Review (Avalance Press)
Defiant Russia is a wargame put out by Avalanche Press and is part of the “Games you can play series” which focues on the Eastern Front at the beginning of WWII and the initial German attack into Russia. The “GYCP” series is a set of inexpensive ($20US) wargames with simpler rules and removes some of the realism often found in wargames in favor of speed and ease of play.
At first, all this seems great for a first time wargamer and at first as I was reading the rules I was getting very excited to play. Once the game actually started going though my excitement started to fade. DR is a game which does away with the Combat Resolution Tables and many other charts/tables to find out what is going on. To me this is a mistake. I’ve played a few other games with a CRT and thought it was a great way to resolve combat. In DR I started to get the feeling I was back playing 40k or other dice-fest. For those who don’t know a CRT involves adding the strenghts together of both sides of the conflict, determining the ratio, rolling one or two dice and cross-referncing the dice result with the ratio reslut. This determines which side won, how many loses were sustained and if one side has to retreat.
DR on the other hand resolves its combat by adding up the strengths per side and rolling a dice for each point of strength. So when you have a stack of units totaling 18 up against a stack totaling 12 then 30 dice are rolled to resolve combat. Each ‘6′ rolled causes a hit by the way. For me this started to create some battles which were not making sense. I think the German dice were cold because they couldn’t get a six to save their lives. This caused the attack on the Eastern Front to stall out the moment it hit the initial (and weak) Russian front which is no where near what really happened in the war.
As the game kept going I started liking it less and less. The dice got to dominate and you roll to many. For as simple as a game it is rule questions and vagueness keep creeping in. Overall by the time I got done with the game I was just glad it was over. I picked this game up hoping that it would be a good introduction to hex-n-chit wargaming, but it turned out to be a bust and unrepresentive of the norms in wargaming.
Good: Inexpensive, simple rules when compared to other wargames, quick for a wargame at 2hrs or so.
Bad: Too many dice to roll, to many rule questions for such a short and small game (an no help from AP to clarify common issues), there are other games out there that are much better to act as an introduction wargame (Across Suez and Leningrad for example).
Rating: 2 out of 5
‘Till Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT
