Week 4 Practical: Battle for Moscow Changes

Review on “Battle for Moscow”

by Edmund Phoon Jian Cheng

The Battle of Moscow is one of the many known armed conflicts that occurred in World War II, whereby the Germans of the Axis forces advances on the Soviet Union to claim the capital of Moscow, which the Soviets struggle to defend their base. Few decades later to the present, the historic event was recreated as a simple board game to provide players the experience of the Germans and Soviets’ perspective in battle. Designed by Frank Chadwick, the game “Battle for Moscow” relives the military campaign of the same name on the area of a map where it occurred, where pieces representing the armies of the Germans and Soviets “fight” one another to take control of or protect Moscow within a week represented by 7 turns, climaxing to the one army’s victory and the other’s defeat of holding Moscow.

Do you think the game is well balanced?

When I first played the game with my team, it was slightly confusing for me due to the fact that players can move their tokens endlessly, as I attempt to understand the mechanics of the strategies made. Even our team has difficulty clarifying the combat results by the roll of the dice when it comes to attacking and taking down the opponent’s token. This evaluation is recorded in a table format based on the number of rolls against the rounding up of the number of odds, something which is however necessary for depleting the amount of strength in each token after an attack. Furthermore, moves also include respawning of tokens that are taken down by opponent tokens. As a result, our playtesting took no longer than 2 hours due to processing the tactics.

How would you modify the game rules to make it more interesting? What would you do to give a slight edge to the attacker? And to the defender?

My opinion in the changes of the game is to make it less compromising as it was before. Instead of letting the players move their tokens to advance or attack with unlimited moves, I suggested to minimise the number of moves to be based on the roll of the dice. Any move of the player’s token or an attack on the opponent’s defender will constitute of one move per the number rolled. The same goes for the combat resolving between the player’s attacking token and the opponent’s defending token; the higher the number, the larger the chance of effect that the player’s token will be able to either send the defender retreating or take down that opponent. In this case, 1 represents attacker is taken out, 2 attacker retreating, 3 and 4 no effect, 5 forcing enemy to retreat, and ultimately 6 to take down enemy. These features would have made “Battle for Moscow” a much easier and faster gameplay without the need to refer to the common rules for a long period of time.