The Bells of Hell Go Ting a Ling Ling

So work's been busy as all getout lately. That hasn't stopped the deliveries of goodies from parts elsewhere thankfully, I'm now at the point where I've got 95% of my boardgame collection stable with very few more purchases needed. I finally got hold of the Stalingrad maps I referenced a while ago, and sure enough there's a significant difference in area covered betweren the large hex and the smaller hex versions, the latter actually reaching to the Volga.How did I pick these up? Through the auspices of Warchest in Melbourne, Australia. Must say I'm every impressed with the service from him. Fair prices to boot.

I bought the second edition of Critical Hit's Valor of the 37th Guards, which included not only the large hex map of the Dzerhezinsky Tractor Works but the original map from the 1997 DTW module and the original Grain Elevator minimap from the 1997 Critical Hit Special Edition. So I've almost completed the necessary accumulation of product.

I'm going to end up with some duplication of mapsheets but that's no hardship as I'm sure I can find a use for them. So basically all I'm after now is the original DTW module with its 2 Campaign games  and four scenarios and the 97SE with the Grain Elevator scenarios/CG. The latter is on order already from The Sentry Box in Canada, and I may have scoped out a copy of DTW although I'm paying the OOP premium :(

I also picked up one of the lesser items on my want list - a copy of the old Area-Impulse ACW game, They Met at Gettysburg which has a poor reputation but surely can be salvaged.

I even started playing some ASL again, Stalingrad natürlich, with my old adversary Jay White. We're now on Turn 3 of our game that was interrupted by me getting sidetracked by real life, and so far it's been one crazy rollercoaster ride once again, with the highlight for me being the critical hit I scored with a Molotov-Projector on one of the two StuIG33Bs Jay is fielding. One flank is almost completely secure through the blazes that have started up.

Anyway I really need to take some pics again (I've been slack - no change there) and posting again

Once more into the rubble...

In Australia, Jason Marks has a small limited edition publishing house that specialises in books on Stalingrad. The range of titles is very small, but the books are some of the few available that deal with the small unit operations within the city, given the destruction of many of the records and the very few survivors from the Kessel.

I'd been after his Death of the Leaping Horseman book ever since I heard about it, but for a while there it was only available on the second hand market for around $200 USD which was just too much for my blood. However the other day, while looking to spend money on research materials, I found he'd reprinted it and I could pick it up for AUSD$80. Oh yeah that was very much in my range again. I also picked up An Infantryman in Stalingrad, a detailed and very interesting reminiscence of the combat experiences of a leutnant in the 94. Infanterie division who took part in the battles for the Barrikady factory as well.

Given I've been on a Stalingrad kick for a while (with varying levels of active work) it was an easy decision to make. I'm still to pick up the latest book, which is another $80 AUSD on the barrikady fighting, but it will come. Anyway this interest in oparticularly the factory fighting arose out of the ASL historical module Red Barricades, which focuses naturally on the Barrikady complex and the period in October November 42 when the factories were progressively assaulted. I'd steered clear of the Stalingrad stuff for a while in ASL, purely because I doubted I'd ever get to do another Campaign game through lack of time and opponents. However while working on the Flames of War Stalingrad book, I found myself looking again at gaming small parts of the fighting using FoW and ASL.

To cut a long story short, the books arrived on Friday, and I've been picking my way through them occasionally as it suited. There's so much detail there at the tactical level, one sees the composition of a particular German assault group down to individual weapon loads for the soldiers. The best thing about the books is that they're based on the actual extant primary source war diaries and corroborating evidence wherever possible, and in the case of the memoir, egregious errors have been corrected but the original errors are footnoted and explained. The only quibble I have is that the maps are just a tad too small and could have been redrawn to give more clarity, but some of the private collection photographs are outstanding, particularly the ones shot while on the approaches to to the actual factories.

I'm now impatiently awaiting the release of Valor of The Guards and the Red October modules from MMP, just to see what the scenario listing is like and how they match up with the descriptions in these books. I don't think you'lll see me trying to build terrain for them anytime soon, at least not until I'm in Aussie myself and have a decent amount of room to store and build the modules, but there's some real incentive to get it right.