It's early January, 1942 here at the Wargate. We've been schlepping tanks to the Eastern Front for a while now, and just yesterday signed off on a huge transfer of men and equipment that will take the war all the way into the next phase. Yes, it's Flames of War season once again.
Our campaign this year already has it's page up, so check out the State of Play on the right. Since we have a lot of new folks jumping in and participating this year, we're keeping the mechanics of the three month ordeal to a minimum. There are two teams, and those teams accrue Influence as battles are played. Easy - but don't worry all you crunch-kins out there. You still have the Flames of War rules themselves to come to grips with, and it is an excellently designed set of gaming conventions that are pretty easy to figure out even if they are somewhat removed from some of the ideas you might possess if you live your life in a Games Workshop hole.
Yet it's how we structure the campaigns overall that is the most interesting part of our venture for me. Each campaign will document the Eastern Front over the course of the war, inching ahead one month at a time. We have looked at several major engagements to make sure the guns will be barking somewhere in Russia or Germany the entire time.
We are going to remain faithful to the historic tales, changing them only where they must be changed to fit our particular continuum. For example, during the real Toropets-Kholm offensive armored support was very limited for the Russians, amounting some 13 tanks (mostly the tiny T-60). For our battle, the tank forces are portrayed by my T-34 and KV-1s tanks - up gunning the Russians considerably. The Germans have more than they had historically as well, with Heer artillery batteries and Waffen SS Gepanzerte Panzergrenadiers. That's ok - it's just a game. Yet, the narrative will follow the historical one...with just a few fictional tweaks to make it relevant to us here in our time and space.
To find out more about the historical operations, Wikipedia is a good place to start. Desertwar.net has a lot of information on all the operations and conflicts you care to research, but the section on Toropets-Kholm lead to some interesting insights. It's not a secret I'm a Soviet sympathizer, but I encourage you to do your own research. Maybe you'll come to the same conclusion that I did - that WWII was darker and grimmer than any hand-me-down grim dark future someone can imagine.