Description

From the publisher's website:

Objective: Stalingrad (OS) is a regimental-scale game of the two-month struggle for control of the 30-kilometer long industrial town that sat on the West Bank of the Volga River. In the fall of 1942, the very experienced German army was pushing further into the Soviet Union despite the serious setback inflicted on it by the Soviet winter offensive in December 1941. The Germans were now fighting a rebuilding Soviet army composed of raw recruits and some veteran units that had survived, and learned from, the battlefield disasters suffered by the Russians in 1941.

The German Sixth Army approached the outskirts of Stalingrad in September 1942 a little over two months into its summer offensive. Although his bombers had destroyed the city's industrial and transportation capacity in August, Hitler ordered the capture of Stalin's city. In Objective: Stalingrad, the German player starts with only sixteen regiments to accomplish this mission. The means to German victory is in the ground-attack Stukas and independent battalions of artillery, combat engineers, anti-aircraft (flak), and assault guns (StuGs) that can be attached to the regiments to devise the best tactical mix of forces to conquer Stalin's city.

While the German regiments were steadily reduced in strength and exhausted to impotence, dozens of untested, conscript Soviet rifle regiments and brigades were obliterated in the house-to-house fighting. Cards will provide crucial influential factors such as snipers, leader initiative, mine dogs, armored trains, and river flotilla warships.

In Objective: Stalingrad the German player commands up to twenty regiments of infantry, including panzer grenadier infantry, along with numerous independent units. There are four scenarios representing each of the major attacks launched by the Germans between 13 September and 11 November. There is also a multi-player campaign game. The smaller scenarios are designed to be played in three to four hours. (For a different approach, see Stalingrad: Verdun on the Volga. In VoV the German player can refight the four major historical attacks using up to nine primary maneuver units – divisions – at an operational level. The same scenario at that level can be finished in one to two hours.)

Objective: Stalingrad is about tactical choices for both the German and Soviet players. If you never had time to play Dana Lombardy's tactical company-level "monster" game Streets of Stalingrad, OS enables you to refight one of the most important battles of World War II in far less time.