Nonetheless, I'm plowing forward (slowly) with preparations for our triple-blind simulation of this opening East Front campaign. I took a look at the rules for The Cossacks Are Coming and its successor, 1914: Twilight in the East, and decided to go with a simpler option, Clash of Giants: Tannenberg. While I can simplify a great deal of the information management for the players, they need to be able to grasp the mechanics even if they don't see them all, and the mechanics of the other games are complex and will slow things down too much. So my next step is to put together a precis of information (basic parameters of the game system, how the refereed version will work, starting order of battle and positions) and share it with the players.
In the meantime, I've found a nice image of the starting positions on the map at Boardgamegeek; I hope the poster, Kevin Moody, doesn't mind my using it as an illustration here.
You can see the full-size image on BGG if you log in there (membership required, but free).
The map depicts East Prussia and some adjoining sections of Russia (including Poland, at the time a part of the Russian Empire). If you look closely, you can see the thin broken brown line that represents the border. In the northwest corner of the map is the Gulf of Danzig, a southerly projection of the Baltic Sea. Also visible is the Frisches Haff, now called the Vistula Lagoon, the large inland sea that lies between Danzig (to its west) and Konigsberg (at its eastern end). Spreading southeast from the Haff is an area of forests, hills, and other rough terrain, in the center of which are the Masurian Lakes. These are over two thousand large and small bodies of water, formed when retreating glaciers deposited piles of debris that blocked rivers and streams and many of them later linked by canals to provide transit across this dense terrain. Further south and east is a large body of marshland. This rather forbidding region is the area that lies, roughly, between the advancing Russian First and Second Armies.
The Second Army starts with much of its force on the board, along the south edge. Most of the First Army is just about to arrive--it's stacked on two entry points on the east edge of the map.
One part of German forces begin scattered in a defensive screen, some distance back from the southeren border, many of them in fortified positions or guarding railway junctions. Guarding them to preserve them for German use, rather than protecting them from Russian capture--Russian railways used a different gauge to German ones and were useless, for the most part, to Russian forces during the campaign. (This makes that thin broken brown border line we looked at earlier rather important.)
The main field force of the German Army in East Prussia lies in and around the town of Gumbinen, near the northeastern border and directly in the path of the slowly arriving Russian First Army.
Another part of German forces is guarding the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg and its extensive defensive network. They include troops standing along one of the main German rail lines (more important for supply than movement), which runs from the border to Konigsberg and then southwest to Marienburg. Another line runs roughly parallel through the center of the province, and a third runs more or less through the lake district. These, too, connect eventually at Marienburg and lead west to Berlin, though there is also a line through the fortress of Thorn to the southwest towards Silesia.
I mention the rail lines not only because the Germans will rely on them for supply, but because the Russian objectives lie most of them along the northern and central lines (as well as at the Frisches ports of Konigsberg and Elbing and the university town of Braunsberg).
The iron cross counters show victory locations that start under German control. The Germans will gain victory points for these if they hold them at the end of the game. Small red dots forther north and west are locations for which the Russians will get points (IIRC, some locations covered by German troops at deployment are also Russian VP hexes).
The game's sequence of play is fairly simple. Both sides check to see which, if any of their forces are out of supply. Then the Russian player places any arriving reinforcements or replacements, moves first one army, then the other, and resolves any combats. The the German player brings in reinforcements and replacements, moves his troops, and conducts combats.
One unusual mechanic exists in this Clash of Giants series. Both sides roll for the movement points of their armies; all units in an army (or, in the case of the Germans, their Eighth Army and the separate I Corps) receive the same amount of movement (exception: cavalry always receive a fixed amount), but it can vary from turn to turn from as few as one movement point (essentially slwoign the army to a crawl) to as many as six.
Another twist to this mechanic in the Tanneberg game is that, starting on Turn 4, the German player--before moving his troops--nominates which Russian army will move first in the next turn and watches the Russian player roll for movement points. Thus the Germans know while they execute their move which of the Russians will move next and how far. (On Turn 1, only the Russian First Army moves--the Second Army is still assembling itself in this period.) This advantage tot the German player is the designer's simple way of reflecting the superior intelligence the Germans got during the campaign when the Russians, outrunning their hard-wired telegraph network and short of trained radio cryptogrpahers, were forced to transmit most of their military communications between armies by wireless with no encoding. German radio operators simply listened in and copied down the orders being transmitted.
I'm going to brief the players now and, with any luck, we should have the first move underway soon!
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