Playing Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia is a tough sell in 2022

The two halves of my own board games collection can be roughly broken down. The first side contains the many titles I remember fondly playing with family and friends. The other side is where you will find all of my wargames. I dust them very rarely. That’s why Unbowed: StalingradIt has made me puzzled. It’s a wargame that those closest to me might actually enjoy playing because the mechanics are light, fun, and incredibly fast. But it is absolutely a wargame — a gritty little thing with slick mechanics, the rare tactical gem that requires planning in order to succeed. I simply don’t know which side of my collection it should go on. You might be in the middle.

Unbowed: StalingradThis is the fourth installment of the Undaunted Series, created by Trevor Benjamin & David Thompson. The deck building mechanic is used. Players start with a small stack of cards, and then work over several rounds to build their deck. There are many tiles on the board, which contain a variety of tokens representing different military units, such as riflemen and machine-gun team members, along with snipers. The cards from the deck are used by players to activate the units. Players move the tokens across the map in order to gain objectives and scores points.

A hand of Russian cards includes a T-34 tank, a rifleman, and a squad leader. All are rendered as cartoons.

Scouting tokens litter the battlefield while scouts (suppressed) and engineers (unsuppressed) hold their positions around a ruined power plant. A tunnel gives them easy access to several different tiles on the board.

It is a marvellous mechanical system that has slowly been improved since its release. Unafraid: NormandyIn 2019. Players must draw four cards before they can bid for who is first. You can activate the units with the remaining cards. Two cards can be pulled for the same unit. They both have the ability to move Fire on your turn. Your troops can pull fog of war cards to have their troops confined in their foxholes, while the enemy walks by. This results in a tactical and tense engagement lasting anywhere between 30-60 minutes.

Unbowed: Stalingrad There are many novel ways to do this. It is possible for the tile tiles to be broken, so the concrete structure you built in game one may be crumbling by the fourth game. You can give each soldier a unique name that will allow you to connect with your deck. And — just like a good game of XCOM — when those soldiers die in combat, they’re removed from the game permanently. The game also benefits from an incredibly clever, single-branched campaign which slowly builds tension and adds units to your reserve pool. The initial fireteams that were fighting street battles quickly morphed into combined arms operations with tanks and artillery.

Multiple nested plastic pack-in containers hold everything needed for Undaunted: Stalingrad. — A handy packing box makes it easy to set up and take down the game.

However, even though the mechanics of the game are top-notch, it’s difficult to sell the main theme. Unbowed: Stalingrad is a faithful re-creation of the historical battle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia — a fight that lasted more than five months, and resulted in roughly 2 million combat casualties and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The combatants simply crawled into damaged sewer pipes in order to kill each other with their empty, frozen rifles. Many were then left starving to death.

Stalingrad, for wargamers is sacred ground. It’s a place we’ve battled over in dozens of different titles, even seen firsthand in video games like Battlefield 1942, IL-2 SturmovikAnd Red Orchestra 2. In contrast, however, it is possible to do something similar. Axis & Allies gives players a sense of cool detachment, a gods’-eye view of a massive world at war, everyone gets their hands dirty in Never give up. And that means fans of traditional board games will have a difficult time choosing between this game’s two utterly deplorable factions. But if players can hold their noses long enough, they’ll find a surprisingly compelling historical narrative and rock-solid strategy gameplay — and a fast-moving campaign that they can easily finish in a single weekend.

Unbowed: Stalingrad Available from Dec. 6. Osprey Games provided a retail copy of the game for review. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.