Roy K. Bartoo - 10:43am Aug 21, 2001 PST (#7778 of 7783) All of which reminds me that I still need to send Nick H. a photocopy of the American-language rules to Credo. Still haven't convinced my gaming group to play it, subject is a bit esoteric. Out of the Wrapper is Masahiro Yamazaki's Seelow & Kustrin, from his "Six Angles" magazine (mag is in Japanese, game comes with English - more or less - rules). Map is 11x17 (approx), full-color, nice looking, scale is about 1 km/hex. Units are companies/battalions for the Germans, Brigades for the Soviets. Each turn is 3-4 hours, and each game lasts two days (plus the night in between). Two half-sheets of 1/2" counters, field-gray for the wehrmacht, blue for the Luftwaffe, white on black for the SS; reddish-brown for the Soviets. Units have combat strength, anti-tank strength, morale, movement: armor units have a drm based on the armor of their tanks (+1 for T34s, Mk IVs, Stugs; +2 for Panthers; +3 for Tigers and Josef Stalins); artillery units have a range, from 8-12 hexes. System is, roughly: bombard with artillery (which ONLY affects infantry and artillery); move; defensive fire at tanks; offensive fire at tanks; combat (which only affects infantry and artillery). Artillery is a big killer of infantry; armor, being almost immune to the crunchies, is good until it comes up against bigger tanks; infantry does what it can, including trying to pin the enemy tanks with ZOC. As the title indicates, there are two scenarios played on the same map and with some of the same counters. Kustrin is the German attempt to rescue some cut-off units in Kustrin (and collapse the Soviet bridgehead) in spring '45. It uses only about a quarter of the map, and a handful of units on both sides. I think it is intended as a learning scenario, but is only barely adequate for that. There are three problems with it. As a learning scenario, it suffers since the Germans have no artillery, and the Soviets have no armor and virtually no anti-tank capability, so importnat aspects of the game system don't get used. As a game situation, I wonder if the Soviets have ever done better than a draw? The Germans have lots of units, lots of time, and they score points for both killing Soviets and rescuing their trapped comrades - but suffer NO penalty for casualties? I managed a draw once by exploiting a rules hole - apparently there is no way to attack across a river-bridge in the game, so having managed to kill the trapped Germans, I withdrew the remaining Soviets to the east side of the river, and there weren't enough Soviets left on the west bank for the Germans to get a victory. What Zhukov would have made of this I shudder to think ("Da, comrade commander, vhat are you doingk?"). The third problem is that I'm dubious of the history. According to Cornelius Ryan's "the Last Battle", the Germans actually managed to fight their way into Kustrin. Which would require, in the game, that (a) there was some way to attack across a river-bridge, and (b) that the trapped German units weren't pounded into sausage by the Soviet artillery (making the wurst of it) - I have yet to see any of the trapped German units survive. The main game, Seelow, is about the Soviet assault that broke the bridgehead open and carried the Soviets up onto the Seelow heights, about two weeks after the previous (Kustrin) game. It uses the full map, and a lot more counters, although counter crush is not a problem - the highest German stack would have three units, the highest Soviet would have two (Zhukov and something else). Setup for both sides is largely fixed, and the Germans are in Big Trouble. The Soviets have quite a bit of heavy artillery, and blow a hole right through the center of the German lines. Aggravating this is a special rule that the Germans cannot move on turn 1. So the Sovs get two turns to barrage, exploit, attack, and shred the German line. Then the Germans get to try to salvage something from the situation. It isn't a totally hopeless situation for the Germans, though, as they have a number of assets. They start with quite a few units (almost all of whom will end in the deadpile); they have some excellent armored units; the Soviet attack quickly moves out of supporting range of the Soviet artillery, which will then have to pick up and move, thus being useless for the rest of the day; and the attack is moving into range of the German guns, who will probably never move even when Soviets roll over them. So the pattern is that the Sovs lunge forward, trying to exploit the momentum of their first two turns; the German artillery tries to disrupt the forward edge of the wave (perhaps allowing trapped German units to escape); German Tigers and Panthers try to hunt down the T34s that are vital to the Soviet effort, while the lighter German armor fends off the Soviet infantry. It is possible for the Germans to 'win' an operational victory by keeping the Soviets from crossing a canal on the first day (game-victory only, as it would still be the loss of some 10 kilometers in a day, and meanwhile Koniev's troops are encircling Berlin from the south); both games I've played have been very near to this, the Soviets prolonging play by having one or two units manage to cling to the west bank of the canal. If play continues into the second day, the Germans are trying to keep the Sovs out of the town of Seelow and the highway leading west. Fun game, their armor and artillery means that the Germs get to do some attacking. There are some rules issues (the rules disagree with the terrain chart as to some modifiers, and a few other points). Roy