Introduction

Battle for the Factories -- Tactical Game of the Campaign for the Northern Half of Stalingrad, 1942.
Designer: Dana Lombardy
Publisher: Nova Designs Inc., 1982

“German panzer and infantry divisions, weakened by weeks of street fighting, now redeploy to assault the northern half of Stalin’s city. Can you do better than the Germans and capture this strategic industrial center on the Volga River? Or as the commander of the Russian 62nd Army, can you correctly direct your elite Guards divisions into the battle to stop the Germans? Battle for the Factories’s companion game in this tactical series -- Fire on the Volga -- enables you to also play the first phase of this epic battle on the Eastern Front.”

This is the 2nd Edition, more commonly referred to as the Nova Edition.

Components

One standard bookcase-style box with a red cover and white bottom. The box is approximately 8.25” wide by 11.25” high, which is a touch too small for my liking. It could easily use another 0.25” in width so that the contents fit flat and snugly, instead of the slight warping that occurs, especially with the rulebook.

One 37.5”x26” four-color unmounted map. This map is the north end of the city of Stalingrad and butts together with the Southern end of the city map found in the sister game Fire on the Volga.

One 32-page rule book in black and white, 8.5”x11” in size.

Seven counter sheets of 240 counters each, for a total of 1,680 0.5” counters.

Three full sheets are German counters, which have a green background with white text and graphics. German support counters are white with green text and graphics. German units have a white formation number on a green background on the backs of most of the counters. German armor units are a lighter shade of green with dark green ink for information and graphics. Four full sheets are Russian counters, which are khaki brown with dark brown text and graphics. Russian support counters are white with brown text and graphics. Russian units have a white formation number on a brown background on the backs of most of the counters. Russian armored units are a lighter shade of brown with dark brown text and graphics. Russian elite Guards units are khaki brown with white text and graphics.

All of the pieces are actual playing pieces, with no informational counters per se. This is a company level game with company and platoon level units and the counter art utilises the tactical military symbols used by both the Russian and German armies of the time. These are substantially different from the NATO symbols you see in the vast majority of wargames published today.

Two Force Pool charts, one each for the German and Russian player. These charts have a sample graphic and a photograph of the type of piece they represent, for example, the Stuka counter is next to a photograph of four Stukas preparing their dive run on the city. The backside of the charts gives the descriptions of the tactical symbols on the counters and a thumbnail outline of game play.

One 11”x17” Terrain Effects chart is included which displays the terrain on the map, a photograph of what the terrain looked like in real life, movement costs, and effects on combat, as well as notes.

One 11”x17” set-up map with the set-up coordinates for the four scenarios included in the game.

Four 11”x16” scenario cards, two each for German and Russian.

One six-sided plastic die.

One 8.5”x11” sheet that describes some of the counters and terrain rules. The idea for Streets of Stalingrad was developed by Dana Lombardy while he was involved in a partnership in Simulations Design Corporation (SDC) in 1976. Dana convinced his partners of the need for a monster game in their line-up, as this was a hot new trend in war-gaming. They were also the publishers of Conflict magazine at the time, and were looking to make a big splash in the industry with a monster game on a hot topic. Unfortunately, their business strategy in the magazine business was to compete with SPI’s S&T by underpricing Conflict magazine to gain market share at S&T’s expense. This was a big mistake and the magazine, and also the venture, sank in financial troubles.

They turned to the Streets of Stalingrad project as their saviour, which ultimately proved to be their undoing. Streets of Stalingrad required an incredible amount of research and thousands of pages of German war diaries, maps and OOBs had to be translated.

Three years into the research, no game was forthcoming and SDC was dead. Along came Phoenix games, and Streets of Stalingrad was finally published. One thousand copies of the original game were printed and sold. This is now a very highly sought after collector’s item.

After the demise of Phoenix, Nova Games picked up the rights to the game. Nova was known for its Ace of Aces game system and no one really took them seriously for any-thing else. They approached Dana to buy the rights to produce it in order to diversify their product line. An additional 100+ hours were spent on splitting Streets of Stalingrad into two games with a plan to put out an expansion set to link the two halves into one campaign. Those two games were Battle for the Factories and Fire on the Volga. The net effect was too many of Nova’s resources were spent on Streets of Stalingrad, diverting attention from what paid the bills, and they too went under.

But not before printing 2,500 copies of Fire on the Volga and Battle for the Factories and 1,000 sets of counters for the expansion set that was never published. Both these titles are collector’s items as well, but for different reasons. The counters had additional information added to them to help out in sorting and set-up. They were also printed in the 0.5” format and played very nicely on the original map, the hexes of which accommodated 5/8” counters.

The game also included a cleaned-up and revised set of rules that was easier to follow than the originals.

Some of the drawbacks to the Nova design are that it is incomplete and can’t be played for what it was intended to be, namely, the campaign game of the battle for the city of Stalingrad. Counters and scenario cards are missing, which were never printed. However, an expansion kit in a limited print run may yet surface.

The story does not end here. Streets of Stalingrad has resurfaced yet again. Uli Blenneman, then-owner of Moments in History, bought the rights to publish the game. However, before he finished the task, he sold his company to Critical Hit, known as makers of Advanced Squad Leader scenarios, and publishers of numerous wargame products.

The third edition Streets of Stalingrad is scheduled to be released in the winter of 2000. The legend continues.

Summary of Rules

The Battle for the Factories rule-book was substantially changed from the original Streets of Stalingrad in format and, to a small degree, the actual rules. The turn sequence remained the same in both versions, but things like the mine dog rule, the retreat before combat rule, the armored target chart and others were omitted. I think the intention may have been to add them to the expansion kit that was planned to be released (but never was) to link Battle for the Factories with Fire on the Volga.

There is a bright side to the Nova version of the rules in that they are slightly better organized then the original Street of Stalingrad rules, which came in two booklets: a basic game rules book and an advanced game rules book. The sequence of play format was borrowed from a John Hill design, called Battle of Hue. It has 10 phases per turn and is very straightforward once you grasp how the system works. However, be forewarned, it is very daunting when you first look at the rule-book and the game system. When you get used to it, it is a very elegant system that works extremely well for this topic and type of battle. It is worth working your way through the rules and learning the system, which will no doubt be a large investment in time.

The turn sequence is as follows:

1) Russian Movement Phase 2) German Reserve Movement Phase
3) Russian Attack Phase
4) Russian Exploit Movement Phase
5) Russian Exploit Attack Phase
6) German Movement Phase
7) Russian Reserve Movement Phase
8) German Attack Phase
9) German Exploit Movement Phase
10) German Exploit Attack Phase

Although this may seem fairly straightforward, there is a very large list of combat die role modifiers that apply to some of the phases, but not all. As the game is a company level game, there is a plethora of different units that participate in the game and many have special rules, units such as flame-throwers, assault engineers, armor, artillery, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, motorcycle units and more. Construction units may build minefields or fortifications, combat engineers add modifiers to the attack, anti-tank guns firing on armor increase in strength substantially, and more. There is an awful lot of stuff to chew on.

The Terrain Effects Chart also plays a major role in combat, not to mention movement. Combat basically occurs by attacking the hex, not the units in it. You declare where your attack is going to fall, tally up the modifiers for unit integrity, assault engineers, Stukas, Leaders, etc., then you see what terrain the defender is in and adjust the modifiers accordingly. The defender then fires before the attack is resolved. Upon resolving defensive fire, you finish the attack with what units survive the defensive fire and adjust the attack according to your losses, if any. Defenders also get opportunity fire when targets present themselves.

Although this all seems easy to digest, the game does suffer from poor rules organization. Resonably well-organized, the rule book still leaves a lot to be desired. Rules are basically presented as a rule in itself. For example, the Indirect Artillery Spotting rules are only a few paragraphs long -- nothing major to digest. However, they are followed by the Hidden Positions rule, Opportunity Fire rule, Crossing the Volga rule, etc., and three to four pages later, you have more artillery rules for Bombardment, Blind Fire and Disruption Bombardment. A reorganization of the rules could be done to keep rules pertaining to similar events grouped together for easier learning and understanding.

One of the most daunting tasks you will have in mastering the game are the die roll modifiers. There are plenty of them. The best thing to do is make up a chart for yourself and divide them up in a useful fashion. This will go a long way to speeding up the play of the game, otherwise you will have to memorize them or constantly refer back to the rules. There is a lot of dice-throwing in this game. Attacks are conducted against individual units, and an attack on a hex stops only when the attacker decides to stop, or he fails to kill a unit. So, a hex with three enemy units will be fired at three times and the defender gets to fire back with defensive fire once for each unit, unless the attack is called off or the previous attack failed to achieve a result. Combat is resolved with a six-sided die, on a CRT matrix that tells you three things: Miss, Score a Kill, or Score a Kill and Leader Eliminated if in the hex.

There are rules to cover many events such as ammunition shortages for heavy calibre artillery. You have to look at the scenario cards to get all the information, as it is not stated or explained in the rules. On the whole, this is a truly great game. The flaws are easily fixed and will surface in the new edition. Regardless, this is a great game to own, to play and/or to collect.

Collector’s Value

Boone lists low, high and average prices of 12/50/28.00 at auction and 24/75/49.14 for sale. For comparison, Fire on the Volga is slightly higher at 12/50/24.11 at auction and 25/100/51.38 for sale.

References

The separate games by Nova got little attention from the wargaming press. However, Phoenix’s Streets of Stalingrad was well represented, and the comments are not inappropriate for Battle for the Factories. F&M 23 contains designers notes, errata and research notes, as does Grenadier 15. Campaign 80 contains an SDC Report.Moves 59 has a lengthy review-cum-obituary.

Other Games of this Type

No other board wargame has been done to quite this scale. The following are all to much smaller scales: Fortress Stalingrad and Struggle for Stalingrad (3W); and Battle for Stalingrad (SPI).

Other Games by Dana Lombardy

Kamikaze (Decision); Alien Contact (Phoenix); Cromwell; Dunkerque 1940; Guerre a Outrance; Khalkhin-Gol (all SDC); NORAD (Mishler & SDC); 4th Reich (Task Force).

Battle for the Factories Counter Manifest