War Stories: Red Storm
Price: 69.90 €
Publisher: Conquistador Games
Reference: CONQ-RS
Format: box
Period: World War II
Language: 
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More infos
An entirely new take on tactical gaming
Secret scenario books and hidden units create realistic fog of war
No charts required: innovative systems make play crunchy yet fast
Dozens of special asset cards with game-breaking abilities
Combat events happen without warning, bringing the battlefield to life
Dozens of infantry, tanks, and halftracks with realistic combat attributes
Intended for...
...wargamers who want it all: lots of realism, lots of goodies, rules that are easy to both learn and play. War Stories combines “Euro-style” mechanics with a handful of innovations, bringing you a beloved theme in a way you've never seen.
Winning at War Stories requires courage evocative of actual battlefield conditions. The enemy might have anything. You don’t know if they have machine guns, mines, artillery strikes, heavy tanks...all you have are your forces, your map, and some objectives. You must act in order to win, but by acting you could be ambushed and blown to bits. In this tense and uncertain environment, victory is all the more sweet.
SUMMARY
You are commanding a small group of infantry and tanks in an historical World War 2 scenario. Like an actual battlefield commander you know what your force and objectives look like but have no idea what the other side is trying to accomplish or how. The cohesion and coordination of your troops is far from perfect as they operate across the engagement area. You may have artillery strikes, bomber support, or reinforcements on the way but you don’t know when they will arrive, or if the enemy has similar trickery planned for you.
War Stories is a game of ordering military units and managing uncertainty. The players take control of either Germany or one of their enemies - the Soviet Union in Red Storm, or the Western Allies in Liberty Road - and fight a scenario based on real battles and campaigns from the war. Each side has their own secret objectives and hidden units and assets. Carrying out your plan is the most obvious path, but don’t ignore the enemy: are they trying to secure high ground to support reinforcements? Dislodge you from a fixed position? Destroy as many units as they can? In most cases you can’t order all of your units at once so you must make smart choices about who to order and when in this unique combination of “wego” and “igo-ugo” play.
Turn Overview
Each War Stories scenario has a variable number of turns. Each turn takes a few minutes.
The turn begins with the attacker playing their order. This allows them to order some subset of their units to move, fire, or both. These units act one at a time. No charts are required: everything needed to resolve movement and combat is right on the mapboard and components. War Stories uses hexes for combat and areas - clusters of hexes that are smaller or larger depending on the difficulty of the terrain they represent - for movement. Separating these actions into the two different shapes enables movement to be a 1-to-1 proposition: for each movement point on your unit, move one full area.
Once your allowed units have all been ordered then you may regroup some of them. Infantry are exhausted whenever they take an action, so regrouping them brings them back to full effectiveness. While vehicles do not become exhausted they are less flexible than infantry and – if, for example, on move orders - need to use a regroup to shift onto fire orders.
A random event will be triggered at an unpredictable point during the course of a player’s turn. The deck of event cards not only serves as the timer for the scenario, it includes a wide array of battlefield effects and player assets that are common in actual battle but rarely represented in a game. The event card system allows us to introduce these varied impacts with zero rules overhead - the card itself holds all of the relevant rules.
About Red Storm
Red Storm depicts the Eastern Front - the Soviets against Germany - during 1942 and 1943. Most of the fronts are represented with the exception of urban warfare such as Stalingrad. At the beginning of this period the Germans have better units and equipment while the Soviets rely more on quantity. However, as the Soviets get more experienced their units improve in valor and begin augmenting their impressive quantity with exceptional quality.
COMPONENTS
5 double-sided mapboards
3 sheets of double-sided terrain overlays
70+ unit blocks
100+ markers
33 asset cards
21 event cards
24 combat chips
1 embroidered drawstring bag
2 16-page scenario booklets
2 player aid screens
1 20-page rulebook