Just the thought of being able to play Drang Nach Osten was exciting! For one who had been unable to play the game in the last four years, the very idea of a whole room full of people playing Drang Nach Osten (DNO) in a tournament was too much too resist. I had to come.

I thought back to my previous attempts to play the game. I fondly recalled the dark, dusty cellar of the Nellingen Kontakt Klub where two friends and I played it to the early turns of 1942. 1 remembered the abortive setups we had done and the agony of moving a game in progress. I fondly recalled my two solitaire games and not being able to eat at the table for a month. And I looked forward to playing in the DNO tournament the way a kid looks forward to Christmas.

So I went to the closet and got the rules out of the large wooden box I had made for the dozens of plastic compartmented boxes that neatly store the units and sat down at my four by eight gaming table that had never been used for playing DNO and read the rules. (I read them again on the plane coming to Origins '80.)

Then I got out all the articles written on how to play the game: two articles in CampaignIPanzerfaust 73 and 76 (it's been a while since anything was written on how to play it) and the game profile in Fire & Movement 17. And so I was ready to play. Or so I thought.

After a morning of sightseeing in Philadelphia and a chance encounter with Dave Williams in the Ramada Inn Coffee Shop - it turned out that I had played nearly every game he has designed: Anzio, Anzio Beach-head, Battle of Moscow, and Red StarlWhite Eagle I arrived at the site of Origins '80 and registered.

Then with nearly three hours to kill before the DNO tournament was to start I wandered over to the dealers' area to meet the folks from GDW. I had a brief chat with Bill Stone about The Grenadier and then wandered over to the open gaming section to look for a chance to play SPI's Leningrad or a quad game or something or other. What a shock it was when I saw the open gaming area: a few small tables set up in the hallways outside the snack bar where maybe twenty people struggled to play admist the din of the passing multitudes. Imagine trying to play Russian Campaign in one of the hallways of an airport and you will have some idea of what this is like. Little, then, did I suspect that the DNO tournament would be held in similar surroundings.

After a greasy hamburger in MacMorland Center, I went to Kirkbride Hall an hour before the tournament was to start to meet Robert Beyma (who ran the tournament) and assist with the set up. To my chagrin the room we were to use was occupied by some sort of a D&D tournament and the room was so small, 30 by 20 feet, that I thought I had come to the wrong building. (I hadn't as I learned later.)

Then at 6:00 p.m. the room slowly began to fill up with the true grognards of the East Front. Of the 80 who had signed up for the event only two dozen arrived. We had come singly or in teams from places as remote as Maine and Georgia. Slowly, folding tables were brought in and Robert Beyma arrived with the games we were to use. We set up eight tables for four games and the teams were drawn up at random except for those who had indicated they wished to play together and the tournament began with only six three and four man teams.

I was assigned to a Russian team of three men from Connecticut who had come down on the bus chartered by the Citadel (not the Citadel in Charleston, SC, as I had supposed). They were John Smith, Frank Skog, and Tom Grady who joined us for play on Saturday. They were all capable players who had played the game more than I had, but they, like me, had not played for a year or two and had merely re-read the rules for preparation. We got along well and enjoyed each other's company.

We decided to form a picket line of overrun-proof units all along the front with the bulk of our units the maximum seven hexes from the border safely out of harm's reach for the first turn. Frank took the Finnish front ("The Finns are finished," he said), John took the center, and I the south. Our strategy was to delay and use armored counter-attacks to inflict casualties on the Huns and then withdraw the armor during the exploitation phase. Then we were to concentrate around Leningrad and Moscow for the showdown in the snow. Had we played any of the other German teams our strategy would have brought victory. But ...

Our German opponents were Lee Tenney, an Army captain stationed at Fort Belvoir, his brother Mark Tenney, a physics major at John Hopkins, and their friend Craig Daniels. Lee and Mark were to wear three piece suits throughout the game. (Now anyone who wears a three piece suit at Origins '80 amidst all the Origins '80 Tshirts really stands out. He is either a turkey or good.)

As our game progressed, it was quickly evident that the Tenney brothers were definitely not turkeys! They were DNO veterans. In fact, they and Craig had played a practice game about two weeks before they came and they had all their starting dispositions already written out!

Craig Daniels took the Finns, Mark took the center, and Lee took the south. On the first turn Lee found a gap in my defenses that I had over-looked in the last minute shuffle of our set-up and he actually overran a 3-6 infantry brigade in the Pripyat with infantry and artillery. On the arctic front Craig had deployed all of the 1-8 jaeger battalions against our light 3-6 infantry brigade screen. They oozed through the gaps and since we had not placed any supplies in the north for attacks, we had to fall back. He also deployed a 12-10 panzer division in southern Finland.

The first turn saw the destruction of our picket line and the pocketing of most of my armor in the south. I gamely counterattacked and vainly tried to fight my way out of the encirclement. On the Finnish front, Frank invaded with the Moscow reserves and chewed up the 12-10 panzer division. John more or less held on his front. I badly mangled three German motorized divisions and assorted smaller units. Indeed, the Germans suffered heavier casualties on our game table than they did on either of the other two tables - some nine panzer divisions, a half dozen motorized divisions, and scores of lesser motorized units and infantry. But our losses were truly horrendous - 500 attack factors had vanished by the end of our second turn! So ended our first night of the tournament.

On Saturday morning we had a command shift. Frank who had badly mangled Craig's command and nearly captured Helsinki went to the south and I took the Finnish front. Tom got a command and managed the air force. But our fierce resistance soon crumbled and we surrendered at the end of the German September I movement phase.

Hell, I had come all the way from Atlanta to spend a weekend playing DNO and I had been wiped out less than half way through the weekend. So I wandered about looking for something to fill the unexpected void. I soon learned that if you get knocked out of a tournament in the early stages of Origins, there are no late starting tournaments to enter.

So I went to the auction where I had a brief encounter with John Mansfield, editor of the Signal, but had no time to reminisce over his tourneys held at the Canadian base near Baden-Baden, West Germany. Then I attended the Europa seminar conducted by the GDW staff and the S&T subscribers seminar.

The allure of DNO proved too strong and I returned around 8:00 p.m. to see how the other teams were faring. On one game the Russian side was manned by members of the Central Virginia Wargame Club, Jim Attaway, George York, and John Voss. They had drawn an over-cautious German team which failed to take even Kharkov, let alone Moscow, Leningrad, or Rostov by the end of the November I turn on Sunday morning.

The Central Virginia Wargame Club, or at least part of it, specializes in playing monster games. They do not play DNO very often as they play War in the Pacific, Wacht am Rhein, Atlantic Wall, and Korsun Pocket. They also spoke quite fondly of the first edition War in the East. They are organizing the National Monstergaming Society (6 East Main Street, Richmond, VA 23219). Their leader, Dick Walker, stressed to me the importance of having regular weekly meetings of a club and of collecting dues so that the group can rent a decent place to play where they can leave games set up. He said that the National Monstergaming Society could make available a list of players so that isolated Europa gamers like me might find someone else to play.

On the other game Robert Glaub, an Air Force intelligence officer at NSA and a veteran of 12-13 DNO games, was the only remaining member of his German team. The other two players had gone off for lunch and not returned, which was probably just as well as they had failed to exploit the self-immolation of the southern Russian front by its commander who had also departed. Craig Daniels had taken over and was mounting a strong threat near Moscow.

On the Russian side Frank Keough, a policeman from Lewiston, ME, defended the northern half of the board and Randal Kaylor, a student from Maryland, held the south with a motley collection of a dozen units. They let me join them and I played the last clear weather turn of October II until we quit Sunday morning after the November I frost turn German move. The game ended more or less in a draw with the Germans hammering at Moscow but too weak to resist counter-attacks during the snow in the gap between the Valdai Hills and the Leningrad front.

I learned a lot about how not to play DNO as the Russians and had some nasty surprises such as having a stack of anti-tank units overrun because they were artillery stacked by themselves and, therefore, defended with a strength of 0. Or, having my units in the Crimea, which I turned into a veritable fortress, suffer isolation because in DNO ships do not provide supply. These are some flaws that the long awaited revision will correct. And I got some conflicting advice on the proper Russian strategy to use. Lee Tenney recommends a rapid and complete withdrawal to the Moscow-Leningrad sector - in UNTjust run further away - without leaving any delaying units in Minsk, Riga, Kiev, or Odessa. The consensus of the Central Virginia Wargame Club was to withdraw leaving full stacks in each of the Russian cities. They also counter-attack from time to time to throw off the Germans. Lee Tenney, however, said it was futile to fight it out anywhere before the mud turns. Which strategy is best? Against a really aggressive German I would say that the run away strategy would work best.

How, then, do I feel about the DNO tournament and DNO itself? I have to agree with the general consensus that the tournament should be organized between teams so that dedicated players will not be sabotaged by inept play and players. DNO itself is as a Venus DeMilo set beside the junk that passes for modern sculpture - blobs of metal, and little suitcases filled with tiny chunks of coal - despite its flaws it is evidence of a superior design concept and as such is the pre-eminent East Front theater game.

Richard Banner best summed up the appeal of DNO with an anecdote about a neophyte gamer who reproached him about the physical quality of the maps. "Yes, you are right," Richard told him, "but when the game was published in 1973 it was the state of the art." To that the neophyte replied somewhat in awe, "1973! You mean to say that people still play a game that came out in 1973?"

Yes, we do.