Kris Hall: Ted Raicer and Stalin’s War

This week I continue my series of interviews with designers of card-driven wargames with an interview with Ted Raicer.  Mr. Raicer is perhaps best known as the designer of Paths of Glory, a classic card-driven wargame that managed the near-impossible feat of turning World War I into an exciting game.  Mr. Raicer’s latest project is Stalin’s War, an eastern-front strategic World War II game that may soon appear on GMT Games’ pre-publication order list.

Kris: There have been lots of games about the eastern front in World War II.  Why another?  What will make Stalin’s War stand out from the pack?

Ted: Two things (I hope). One it is a card-driven design--in fact a hex-based card-driven design, which hasn’t been done for this sort of linear land campaign. (Mark Herman’s Empire of the Sun used hexes, but it covered a mainly naval/air war.) And second, the scale is somewhat different than most games on the subject. The hexes cover over 60 miles, and Soviet units are fronts and armies, while German units are armies and corps, but all the German mechanized units are corps (unlike WWII: Barbarossa to Berlin where most of the German armor is represented by army-level units). Of course in large part that comes from the difference between using hexes and point-to-point (as in BtB).

Kris: Designers commonly use the card-driven system in wargames when they want to add political, economic, religious, scientific, or diplomatic aspects to their games, but want to keep the complexity level low.  In the wargames that model it, the German-Soviet war has typically been a purely military conflict.  So why create a card-driven design?  What do you gain by using cards to model this conflict?

Ted: Well first, when you are covering essentially an entire war (and the East Front from June 41 was THE major theater of WWII in Europe) there is no such thing as a purely military conflict. Politics, in this case especially internal politics (the growing divide and suspicion between Hitler and his generals; Stalin’s initial insistence on having his own way, which unlike Hitler lessened over time, which is a major reason the Germans lost in the end, etc.), are important elements of the war in the east. But beyond all that, cards allow an easy method of command/control and logistics, and (at least when not playing solo) limited intelligence. You may know what the enemy has on the board, but you don’t know what is in his hand. And you may have your “perfect plan” but command or logistical problems (not having the right cards) may force you to improvise. (No plan survives contact with the wrong card draw.)

Kris: What changes or innovations did you make to the card-driven system to make it suitable to your subject matter?

Ted: Well, I was a fan of the old The Russian Campaign (despite the mountains of Lvov and several other problems) and I wanted a game with somewhat of that feel, but with the advantages (meaning limitations to the players) that cards impose. So mixing hexes with cards was the challenge. Ultimately what made it work was using card Operations (the old OPS points) to represent the requirements for attack and the difficulty of disengaging from contact with the enemy. So regular movement doesn’t require OPS points (though it still requires playing a card as an OPS event). But you need OPS to attack, to do strategic movement (rail, sea moves), and to leave an enemy ZOC (yes, this game has Zones of Control). Though you can leave a ZOC without OPS if you leave a unit a behind.

Kris Does your system feature separate decks for each player?  Different decks for different periods of the war?  What are some of the more important events in your card decks?

Ted: Yes, there are separate decks for each player, and for the initial Barbarossa phase and the war after it becomes clear this is going to be a long war of attrition and not another France 1940 blitzkrieg. (Basically the play of enough events causes the addition of the later war cards to the game.) A lot of the events cover things also included in BtB, but the actual effects are different. And since I don’t have the rest of the war in Europe to model, I could go into more detail than in BtB. SW has a card, for example, for Soviet Mice, which represents the time mice ate through the electrical wiring of the tanks in the 22nd Panzer division, virtually knocking it out of action. There are important cards representing Stalin’s initial insistence on counterattacking and not retreating, and Hitler’s interference with his generals. (Which is not to say the generals were always right, but regardless, a divided command is not a good thing for an army.) And all reinforcements are introduced through cards as well.

Kris: Any World War II game with Soviet mice is going to have its own special flavor.  But big-picture games inevitably end up emphasizing some aspects of the war while simplifying others—things like logistics, leadership, combined arms strategies, etc…What aspects of the war does your design emphasize?

Ted: Oh, I’d say inherently command and control/logistics. Not just through specific events but just the general card mechanic. An offensive in this game takes ammo and fuel and planning (OPS points) and you can’t just attack everywhere your troops can reach.

Kris: What is the complexity level of the game?  What will the playing time be?

Like most of my designs, I’d say moderate complexity. It is fairly long (if it goes the distance to 1945) but still playable in a single day.

Kris: Will the game have more than one scenario? 

Ted: That’s still up in the air. I hope to add at least one later war scenario, though that might appear in C3I rather than in the game. It depends basically on whether I can put it together in time to be playtested enough to go into the box.

Kris: If you could recommend just one book as a history of the German-Soviet struggle, what would it be?

Ted: Tough one. But I’d say David Downing’s The Devil’s Virtuosos. Downing (writing in the 70s) is too easy on the German generals in terms of their involvement in war crimes, but I think he captures well the dynamics of the campaigns. And the writing is a pleasure to read.

Kris: What was the biggest difficulty you had designing the game?  What are you most proud of in the design?

Ted: Getting cards and hexes to meld. It was only when I decided that you could move most of the time without OPS that the two came together. I’ll hold off on deciding what I’m proud of until after I see if enough players like the game. 

Kris: When is the game likely to be added to GMT’s 500 list?

Ted: This fall.

Kris: What future projects would you like to work on?

Ted: I’m already working on a ton of stuff; games on the Allied campaign for Northwest Europe from D-Day to over the Rhine, on France 1940, on the Falaise Pocket, another bigger east front design. And others. Plenty to keep me busy. (And yes, I’m getting more into WWII now, though I’m sure I still have some WWI designs left in me.)

Kris: Thanks for the interview.  I’ll be watching the GMT website to see when Stalin’s War appears. 

© 2007 Kris Hall

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