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Red Winter from GMT Now Available

Elliott MillerJul 1, 2012

The P500 games have been shipped and Red Winter from GMT Games is now available at better game stores everywhere.

Red Winter is the first in a proposed series of games covering battles of the 1939 Russo-Finnish Winter War and World War II at a rarely gamed scale: company sized combat units and 90 minute game turns. The Winter War games of the series will be characterized by highly fluid frontlines, wild flanking maneuvers by night, Finnish night raids, and a low unit density across a wide and shifting front. Future Winter War games in the works include the battle for Ägläjärvi, and WWII games in the works include Operation Dauntless (the Allied flank attack near Caen, France, in June of 1944), and several Pacific theater battles of WWII.

In Red Winter, players assume the roles of the Soviet and Finnish commanders during the unusual battle for Tolvajärvi, Finland, controlling the actions of Finnish ski infantry, Soviet tanks and heavy machine gun companies, mortars, anti-tank guns, and other combat units. The game map is populated by forest, suo (wetlands), small Finnish settlements, and a network of crude roads and trails. However, the dominant feature of the map is a system of sprawling, frozen lakes. Combat units can very often gain favorable positions by crossing these lakes, but they do so at considerable risk…Units caught out on the ice make very inviting targets!

Based upon recent Finnish and Soviet sources, Red Winter is the product of several years of research and development. It was designed with an emphasis on speed, ease of play, and competitive play balance. The rules are built upon classic hex & counter wargame mechanics in combination with novel and well-integrated systems for ranged attacks, unit recovery, Finnish night raids, and sub-zero weather attrition losses. Low counter density and individually simple mechanics combine to allow each player the luxury of completing his turn in about five minutes. This means the full 40 turn campaign game is playable in a single, long afternoon. The large 5/8 inch counters and oversized hexes further enhance playability. And the Play Book’s illustrated examples make it easy to jump right into the action.

Background

It is the winter of 1939 and the Soviet Union has just declared war on Finland. Bombers unleash a downpour of destruction on the Finnish capital of Helsinki. In the David and Goliath struggle that follows (the population of Leningrad alone was greater than the whole of Finland!), four million Soviets swarm across the border and push back the Finns in victory after victory. The future appears grim for Finnish independence.

Nowhere is the danger greater than in the central sector, where a Soviet breakthrough would threaten the strongpoints of the Mannerheim Line. Newly assigned to the sector, the Finnish Colonel Paavo Talvela surveys the situation. He is already thoroughly familiar with the terrain, having extensively wargamed the very situation now at hand, and also having led troops in the region during the Finnish civil war. Talvela chooses the place to make a stand: a lake called Tolvajärvi.

The weary and demoralized Finnish ski troops have mere hours to recover a semblance of order before the Soviet juggernaut smashes into them yet again. Initially, the Finns are outnumbered five to one. Although reinforcements will eventually increase their manpower to roughly even with the Soviets, they will remain outnumbered three to one in automatic weapons, a staggering ten to one in artillery, and suffer from a complete Soviet monopoly in tanks.

Over the next five days, the world watches in awe as the Finns manage to halt the Soviet advance through sheer heroic determination. Then, miraculously, the Finns launch a successful counterattack…