Panzergruppe Guderian: the Battle of Smolensk, July 1941: modified
victory conditions / John D. Beardsworth

When playing SPl's Panzergruppe Guderian as the Russian player, are you
sick of seeing your gleeful German opponent wiping out your beautiful
red rifle divisions and seizing the cities of Mother Russia? As the
German player, do you get bored of removing those nasty red counters and
having no real resistance or challenge after a few game turns? You can,
at no cost to yourself, transform a reasonable exciting game into a
veritable "slug fest" (an S&T creation roughly translated as a festival
of fighting).

I have found that the major problem with this game about the Battle of
Smolensk is the determination of victory - it is much too easy for the
German player to win.

For those boardgamers who do not have this aame. I shall outline the
victory conditions. The German player receives victory points for
occupying Soviet cities and certain hexes. The Soviet player receives
five points each time he recaptures a city. The Soviet victory point
total is then subtracted from the German victory point total and the
result is compared to a list of victory levels.

The Soviet player may often destroy individual regiments of a division
but it is indeed rare that he can eliminate an entire division. This
means that although the Soviets may inflict heavy losses, they do not
get any credit for so doing, although losses inflicted on the Germans
were important back in July 1941.

My solution is to award the Soviet player one victory point for each
step loss inflicted on German units (including the cavalry division) and
to award one point to each player for each minor city he occupies at the
end of the game (the German player still receives ten victory points for
Yel'nya for which the Soviet player would receive one point).

Example: The Soviet player has eliminated an infantry divison 14 steps)
and a Panzer division (6 steps). He would thus receive ten victory
points (4 + 6 = 10).

These modifed victory conditions have the effect of encouraging the
Soviet player to attack and make the game much more ferocious. They
probably benefit the Soviet player more than the German but the game is
already unbalanced so neither player is losing too much or gaining
excessively.