My first opportunity to play A Winter War came when a person named Stan (I don't know his last name), who had recently moved to Columbus, contacted me. He had read my articles in The Europa Magazine and noticed I hailed from Columbus, so he phoned me and wanted to play Europa. I have since lost his phone number, so I never have seen him again.

I went over to his apartment, where we played A Winter War, since that was the game we were both least familiar with. Getting to his place was a serious problem in itself, even though he was only a three minute drive away, because a torrential downpour flooded all the roads so that I couldn't get to his apartment -- on one road, a fallen tree blocked the way.

Finally, I arrived. By random die roll, we determined sides and I ended up with the Soviets while he played the Finns. We used rules as written, except, of course, we axed the awful patrol rules.

Not having played the game before, I tried to come up with a viable strategy. I assumed that he would be very powerful along the Leningrad Front, so I wanted to put pressure on him from elsewhere. Think of the eastern border of Finland as divided into three sectors - Northeast, East, and Southeast. What I wanted to do was try to defeat him in the Southeast.

I started off very slow. Mistakenly thinking he was too strong along the Leningrad Front, I didn't even attack along it during the first turn. This was a poor decision on my part. Along Finland's eastern border I did better. My opponent had neglected to garrison the far north at all, so my Murmansk garrison scurried through the snow to take the point cities up there. In the center, I was also able to advance. In the Southeast, I prepared for a major attack.

The next turn, though, was my turn from hell. I launched attacks with virtually all my forces, on every front, generally at good odds, but didn't cause a single enemy casualty. This was very frustrating. I felt that I was not making much progress at all.

However, my perseverence held out. I eventually broke through in the EastSoutheast sector and annoyed him in the East-Central. Virtually all of his reinforcements and replacements were diverted to deal with these threats.

Eventually, as I could flip corps, my Leningrad sector was also finally able to be effective. However, I never did make significant gains down there -- the game ended too soon. This made me regret even more that I had not attacked there on the first turn. All my gains came from taking point cities and inflicting casualties (except for a few measly terror bombings) in the Eastern sectors.

After the game, we analyzed what had just happened. I felt that my opponent had not been aggressive enough. Although he nicely managed his partisans, frustrating me considerably (I hate having to worry about things like that), he probably could have used some of his ubiquitous and cheap ski units to attack me, especially if he could isolate me first. And even keeping me isolated would get him some victory points. I suggested that he could have done a few major counterattacks, too, but he disagreed with that suggestion, saying the risk would have been too high. It seemed to both of us -- based on our single playing of the game -- that the Soviets did have the advantage in the game.

It was a pretty good game, all in all, and one played in an evening - and you can't say that about too many Europa games.