The 1999 Boardgame Players Association Tournament Final

Allies: John Clifford
Axis: Byron Stingley

Played at the Boardgame Players Association game convention in August, 1999.

Totaler Krieg! was a very successful tournament event at "DonCon" (the revitalized Avaloncon convention). For more information on that, be sure to click on the logo you see on the left. Alan Emrich made the trek to host this event and the sixteen entrants all indicated that they had a good time. Alan had a great time running this event, too (collapsing from exhaustion only once -- and that prior to the news that he would suddenly be starting a new job in California and his wife began having contractions!). The players were nice and very eager to learn about all the cool new things in Totaler Krieg! Although Paths of Glory might have been the Belle of the Ball at Don Con, TK! did very well indeed and was widely regarded as a game that will long endure as a favorite. It was particularly edifying to see Bruce Harper and other died-in-the-wool Advanced Third Reich players coming over to inspect TK! and ask questions.

Player experience varied widely among the assembled participants. Alan was teaching new players and recent TK! owners during the days and even minutes before the tournament began. The first photo, above, shows one of our rows of tables with players heavily engaged in the tournament scenarios. In the foreground on the left is Byron Stingley who scored highest in the qualifying three rounds and went on to fight in the finals. Standing and looking over the event is Ananda Gupta, whose comments on the ConsimWorld message boards about TK! have always been cogent. After a full day’s play of the three "qualifier" tournament scenarios included in the game, the cream rose to the top. The top two finishers, Byron Stingley and John Clifford squared off on the next day to fight out a one-map campaign covering the entire war in Russia. Byron commanded the Soviets while John captained the Axis war effort.

Byron used an interesting Soviet "rearward" deployment of his initial forces, placing his starting armies in Eastern Poland in a line anchored on Minsk (as shown in the left photo above). Presumably this was an attempt to minimize the impact of the initial Axis onslaught, in particular Axis Air Support in the Soviet rear and to limit the Axis ability to create and devour pockets easily. The results seemed mixed, but this is a defense that is worth of further study.

John’s Barbarossa got off to a bit of a rough start, though, as Soviet units in the south managed to infiltrate their way into Rumania where they malingered throughout the summer and fall into the bad weather at the end of 1941. It was a little embarrassing, but John, being British, kept muddling through, as shown in the picture above, on the right.

At the end of his advance, John’s Axis forces had concentrated mightily on Leningrad, reaching the ancient capital before it could be properly fortified, and added that objective to Minsk and Kiev to define the limits of Barbarossa's success. Moscow, Rostov, and Sevastopol remained firmly in Soviet hands, however, as the winter of '41/'42 set in. The situation was tense, as illustrated by the picture above on the left.

Byron’s Soviet winter counteroffensive was well conceived and fairly executed, forcing John to circle the wagons in front of Moscow (as the above picture on the right shows). John, however, decided to make Moscow his prime target for his 1942 campaign, shoveling considerable reinforcements to the sector. This allowed him to stave off disaster from Byron’s counteroffensive, but also to position his forces for what would be a gruesome campaign of bludgeoning attrition around Moscow.

By the fall of 1942, both sides were piled high around Moscow, with the Soviets hanging on for dear life. It was like a giant troop magnet, and John attacked it obsessively, leaving the remainder of the Russian Front fairly quiet. Finally, however, as 1942 wound down, John’s exhausted forces secured Moscow, a vacation spot that they would not long be visiting.

As the Summer of 1943 unfurled, John regrouped the Axis forces to more defensible positions and awaited every opportunity to counterattack advancing Soviet forces, particularly stalking Byron’s tank forces. The attrition was pretty brutal on both sides, but Axis losses to date were not of historical proportions, so John always seemed to have forces handy to shore up the line and plug most breeches. Byron’s advance was inexorable, but would it be swift enough?

Eventually, a huge force of pocketed German forces in Moscow were wiped out as the Soviet hammer (and sickle) landed hard along the center of the line. John did manage to extricate several cut-off forces from the far north and retrieved a good many steps that Byron seemingly let out of the bag.

To his credit, though, Byron did manage to cross the far north all the way to Narvik, which he secured in 1944. In the end, though, the Axis were still holding Leningrad and Minsk, so John was awarded the victory.

In our final picture are the tournament winners. From left to right are Byron Stingley (2nd), John Clifford (1st), and Paul Abrahamse (who drove all the way out to DonCon with me from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to participate in this event) who placed 3rd; Ray Hall, one of our winners from Origins (pictured above with a "thumb's up"), finished in 4th place. Congratulations to everyone who played, and especially John. Well done! Oh, and one last thing... if you want to see about the nicest praise TK! could possibly get, watch this little video of Mark Herman and his comments about the game: just click here.