What is it about Moscow? The food is bad, the climate worse, and the inhabitants are surly and oppressed. Yet everyone wants it, and in just the last few years we’ve seen one game after another wherein the designer sends the gamers on yet another ill-fated mud-quest against Poor Old Mother Russia. So far, senseless crusades have been launched by The Gamers and GDW, the latter one of the hobby’s legendary duds. Doc Decision recently gave Charles XII another shot at Muscovy. XTR’s Proud Monster detumesced before her gates, and now we’re given the spectacle of seeing GMT and 3W (or whatever thinly-disguised front KP is now using) engage in a von Borries tug-o-war over which has the real “Spires” of Moscow. Historically, Napoleon took Moscow … and a fat lot of good it did him. And now, eminent Eastfront designer, Jack Radey, has, at long last, emerged from his hibernation to fall (from a tree) into our laps with his own bid for the Kremlin. Borodino ‘41 covers the early October battles near Vyazma, the attempt by the Germans to break through the outer ring of Moscow’s defenses and control the one real, paved road into the capital. The game pits two German divisions - 10th Panzer and Das Reich motorized - first against a motley assortment of detachments, and then a very serious, and veteran, Siberian division plus four tank brigades. If you were playing War in the East or Europa, this would be the point at which your panzer/motorized columns would be outrunning their supply chain and the mud is about to hit any turn now … but it’s your absolute last chance to break that brittle line of chewed-up Soviets before a real defense can establish itself. Thus, right from the start, Borodino is no panzer-romp, but a game of desperation, with little room for error. To get into this interesting and puzzle-like situation, CoA gives us battalions and companies milling about in half-mile hexes. Infantry is rated for strength (100 men per point), morale and anti-tank strengths. Artillery units are rated for defense support, and all units have either a red star or an iron cross on their flip side, allowing for a bit of the old fog of war. And to help that feeling along, we get a bunch of dummies … counters, not players, although that isn’t ruled out entirely. The graphics are first rate, with counter silhouettes showing the type of tank used by each armored formation, and NATO symbols in place for the rest. As is de rigeur these days, units are also color-coded for their organization. Now, some have complained that the map is a mite dreary. It should be; this is Soviet Russia, not Quintana Roo. As for the boxcover art, WWII games too often give us pictures of smug, jack-booted Teutonic types conquering the world. Borodino, however, opts for a Soviet wartime painting of a Russian tank charge, led by a helmeted figure that is either Mussolini’s clone or Uncle Fester on steroids. For me, it all looked like Love at First Sight, as I love the period, and especially enjoy games with the level of detail Radey’s previous work promised. Great, therefore, was my disappointment when I started to play. Detailed games are no fun at all if you can’t figure out how to play them. Borodino was either never developed, or there were some massive communication problems between designer and publisher. (ED. as we, too, have heard.) The big stumbling block is the Sequence of Play. The rulesbook presents it in narrative form, with very confused and tortured language that is of little help in an already opaque situation. For example, you have the player who wins the initiative (and thus gets to go first) being called the “initial” player; he gets to undertake and Initial Movement Phase. Later, though, we are told that, under certain circumstances, the “second” player may get an Initial Movement Phase. This goes back and forth in verbiage so thick and heavy you could park your car on it. My opponent and I sat with our engines idling for an inordinate - and frustrating - amount of time, sequence in hand, trying to determine whether what we now had was the second player undertaking his initial movement phase, or the initial player undertaking a second phase, or Lord knows what?!? Having to constantly refer back to a source that is as impenetrable as Balkan politics is just not fun. Worse yet, Clash was not kind enough to include such basic play aids as a Turn Record and Impulse Track, turning any given turn into a medieval maze. And the writing!! Amy the Gorilla could have taken a weed-whacker to the verbal tonnage the rules sport with better results than what the players are handed. No developer is listed in the credits, possibly because there was none … or no one wanted to assume the blame. Still another problem is the “chrome”. Most of the dieroll modifiers and effects created by special units are buried somewhere in that morass of a manuscript, and none of them could hack their way out onto a simple list on the Charts and Tables Sheet. You want to know what that unit is going to do to your dieroll? Well, grab your machete, call in Indy, and traipse once more into the Jungle of Doom. After an hour or two of this, you both feel and look like Jack Hawkins did in the last reel of “Bridge on the River Kwai.” Jack Radey is one of the premier WWII designers in the hobby; he has never failed to give us insightful games with interesting, often unusual, mechanics. This time, though, he may have met up with the wrong publisher. Clash, too, appears to think highly of Radey, so much so that they did not even bother to run the game through the development process. Borodino is a potentially rich and challenging game, and one wonders how well it might have turned out had CoA paid more than 3W-like attention to it. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphic Presentation: Very good, detailed and evocative. Playability: Needs a total rewrite to even start to qualify under this category. Replayability: See above. Creativity: Radey has always done interesting work, and this is no exception. Historicity: Good. Nice to see an Eastfront game where the Soviet armor - here, T-34’s and KV-1’s - can chew-and-spit on the Germans. Comparisons: Better than the GDW disaster, but we’ve seen far better Radey stuff. And head-to-head with The Gamers OCS or TCS it hardly even stumbles out of the starting blocks. Overall: Will someone who knows what they’re doing, please republish this game?! CLASH OF ARMS One 22” x 34” map; 280 counters; Rules Book; Roster Sheets; Charts Sheet; boxed. Clash of Arms, Phoenixville PA $35 Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. II # 18 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com