At the end of last year Jo asked if I had ever revisited my Krasny Bor Campaign for Crossfire and the Blue Division. Sadly the answer was no, but it prompted me to rectify the lapse.
I have persuaded Chris Harrod and Jamie Wish to play the campaign. This was a bit different: two players not eight; two months not two days. Here is some advice for anybody who wants to give it a go.
Order of Games
The Krasny Bor campaign has four games in Phase 1 and another four games in Phase 2. Phase 1 represents the fighting between 0800 and 1030 hours, phase 2 between 1030 and 1300 hours.
We first thought that the games would be played left to right on the front tables then left to right on the rear tables. I decided to do it a different way to for two reasons:
- create more tension
- give intermediate milestones and potential breakpoints
I decided to play the two games in each zone one after the other: Phase 1 immediately followed by Phase 2. If we only ever played two games we’d have a result for the campaign. These are big games so there was a fair chance we’d never play all eight games. If we did manage to play more games, we could tally the score after every couple of games.
I also changed the order away from the left to right thing. I wanted the fight at El Bastion (Zone 2) to be late in the campaign and the battle In the Streets of Krasny Bar (Zone 3) as the finale. So I went for Zone 1, Zone 4, Zone 2 and finally Zone 3.
So, for two players, the games are played in this order:
- KB1F Advance from Ian Ishora
- KB1R Paper Factory
- KB4F The Embankment
- KB4R The Swamp
- KB2F El Bastion
- KB2R Moscow-to-Leningrad Highway
- KB3F Krasny Bor this way
- KB3R In the streets of Krasny Bor
When to play
We normally wargame on a Thursday night. A “school night” as they say. So normally we play quite short games and for Crossfire that usually means a 4′ x 4′ table with a company or so a side.
But the Krasny Bor Campaign games are big. A couple of battalions of Soviets chewing on a couple of companies of veteran Spanish with the Spanish fighting to the last man.
And that means the games are long. We found we needed a hour or so to set up then we needed 6 hours of game time to see them to conclusion. That meant one of our games ran from 2000 hours on Thursday to 0200 on Friday. Which, for a school night, is quite late.
After two such epic evening games we decided we had to play the games on the weekend. All day events. Not too surprising given the original outing was a weekend affair with Phase 1 on Saturday and Phase 2 on Sunday.
That’s it. Good luck. And let me know how you get on.