To use current Hollywood jargon, this updated edition represents a 'complete reimagining' of the original Drive on Stalingrad game. I asked Christopher Cummins to allow me to take that approach because, unlike some of the other old-SPI titles currently being revised in a more minimalist way (since that's all they really need), I consider original DoS to have been pretty near a complete failure.
Back in my salad days I played a lot of the original version of DoS, despite the many problems with it. The topic itself was so promising - the hinge period of World War II in Europe - you couldn't help but want to like the game. That was true even though signs of trouble showed up as soon as you took the box out of the shipping carton. First, the cover illustration was taken from 1941's Operation Barbarossa, not 1942's Operation Blue. That's a small point, but it proved an omen of other, bigger incongruities to come. Second, at SPI they couldn't seem to decide on the exact title of the game. Was it: 'Drive on Stalingrad: Drive On,' or 'Drive On: The German 1942 Summer Offensive,' or 'Drive on Stalingrad/Drive On: The German 1942 Summer Offensive'? Again, that's a small thing, but it turned out to bespeak a similar lack of clarity of design vision throughout the whole game.
There were no marsh hexes, though they were replaced by a made up, incredibly large, zone of 'light forest' paralleling most of the rivers out to a range of one hex, about 8.5 miles. There are trees along many southwest Russian rivers, but they're a phenomenon to be measured in yards, not miles.
Soviet air power was exaggerated, while well over half of what should've been the initial Red Army ground order of battle was simply omitted.
The zone of control rules allowed such things as, for example, one Soviet rifle division stopping all movement past it along a front of about three hexes (25 miles) for a week at a time.
The 'Hitler Directives' rule didn't work for its intended purpose (game balance), succeeding only in causing the German player to spend a great deal of time figuring ways to get around it.
DoS was supposed to have been playable in 'one long sitting,' which it was in a way, but only if you could keep sitting for about 20 hours straight.
Most noticeably, no game ever came close to paralleling the historic action. That occurred, first, because hardly any match was ever played to the end. Typically, the German player would go through what was for him the fun part of the game, usually the first 10 or so turns, then look at his opponent and say something like: 'We can see where this is going, can't we? Why don't we pack this up and play something that'll be fun for both of us?' We used to call this 'Battle of the Bulge Syndrome' in my gaming circle, naming it after the first title we'd owned where we noticed it came into use.
Second, the game failed to model the whole campaign because the historic event had been based on Hitler's increasing denial of reality concerning the capabilities of both his enemy and his allies. That is, no matter how the Directives rule went in any given game, there was never a time, come November, that a German player would have 20 or so German divisions concentrated within three hexes of Stalingrad, with the flanks out to a depth of 20 or more hexes held by nothing but Axis satellite units. There is no rule that can be used to recreate that kind of strategic ignorance in today's gamers.
The time period encompassed by the original one-scenario game was in fact not really a unitary campaign; it was two distinct campaigns. The first, the German summer offensive, petered out historically, as well as in most playings of the original edition of the game, around the middle of September, after which all the action came down to two or three hexes at Stalingrad and another handful of hexes along the road to Grozny in the far south. Historically, and often in the original game, that was followed by what might best be called an intercalary period of near complete inactivity almost as long as the first phase, followed by some kind of Soviet counterattack.
At one of the Origins conventions shortly after the original DoS was released (79 or 80), I remember hearing its designer Brad Hessel explain how he thought the truck-supply rules clearly demonstrated the 'impossibility' of conducting major offensive operations using that kind of shoestring logistics. Exactly those supply rules demonstrated the impossibility, not the difficulty, the impossibility of conducting army group size offensive operations on shoe string logistics. Even gamers who enjoy working with those kinds of mechanics were frustrated when pitted against competent Soviet play, because no matter how well they learned to manipulate truck chains there simply wasn't enough supply to maintain German offensive momentum.
It wasn't that the truck supply rules were historically inaccurate, they weren't,but they were competitively futile and frustrating. The way to escape that isn't to undue or disregard history, but to better craft the game so as to avoid the necessity of simulating history's dreary parts. In that way I end the new Operation Blue scenario on 15 September. It was then the summer campaign really ended historically, for it was after that the German logistics failed.
They'd planned a summer campaign and had the resources to run a summer campaign, not a summer-into-autumn campaign. It was the changing weather within the theater of operations, as much as the increasing length of their supply lines across it, which changed the nature of the operation after that date. If the German hasn't won by the middle of September, he's not going to do it after that either, no matter who much time the turn record track might otherwise seem to allow him to try to do it.
In that way and others I've worked to overcome the first edition's shortcomings and frustrations. Those who feel somehow let down by my approach are invited to purchase a copy of the second edition as released in Japan, which takes the minimal revision path and is available through Desert Fox Games. I eagerly invite comparison between the two efforts.
This is the general introduction to the redesign approach I adopted for this project. Specific changes are discussed at those places below in the rules text where they occur in various 'Design Notes'.