Variant: Operation ZUGSTOSS, for Berlin ’85

Berlin ‘85: Enemy At The Gates was designed by James Dunnigan, one of my favourite game designers. It was the issue game in #79 of Strategy and Tactics magazine and SPI also published it separately in 1980 in the small box format. I really liked the topic of this game – the desperate defence of the multinational garrison of West Berlin at the beginning of a Soviet invasion of West Germany – and played it a lot, back in the day. But over the years more material has appeared on the probable course of such a hypothetical battle, and my thinking on urban warfare and how it is modelled has changed.

This extensive variant takes several rule changes and modifications I wanted to make to the game’s system and applies them to a new scenario adapted from the “Operation STOSS” variant prepared for the game in 2003 by Kevin Boylan, and later modified by Morris Hadley, Richard Kelly, Richard Lloyd, Paul Rohrbaugh, Paul Smith and others in subsequent years. (Find the original variant and its revisions and commentary at https://grognard.com/Board.aspx#st79 or on the Consimworld Forum site at http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX/.1dcdf54f)

Changes to the overall game system and its Berlin 85 adaptation, to show the intensity of urban combat: players have the choice of fighting before moving; no Zones of Control; no mandatory combat; combat results replaced with system of step reductions; Concealment markers added for giving stationary defending units a slight transitory advantage; and changes to Honors of War and Victory Point schedules made in respect of psychological war against the West Berlin inhabitants. (Many of these changes could be retrofitted easily to the Modern Battles and Modern Battles II quadrigames, or for that matter the more recent folio and magazine games from Decision Games that use the “Fire and Movement” system.)

Variant goes on to update and revise the 2016 “Operation STOSS” variant to ZUGSTOSS: task-organized combat groups for reduced Warsaw Pact Order of Battle; breakdown counters for NATO maneuver battalions, reorganized into combat teams; alternative uses for the US Special Forces unit, broken down into A-teams so the NATO player has some fun while getting crushed in a three-way vise; and a Bundeswehr Luftlande (airlanding) brigade to replace the mechanized Jagerbrigade reinforcement. All of this comes with a new sheet of counters.

I’ve been working on this for a while… why bother, with a game that is over 40 years old? Well, because it is still one of my favourite games, with a lovely mess of a map by Redmond Simonsen and because it is one of the few credible older games on urban combat at an operational scale.

(new rules)  Berlin 85 ZugStoss variant 27 Nov 23

(new counter sheet, PDF) Berlin 85 variant ctrs Z85 22 nov