I said I'd write more about wargaming and here I am.

My board game interest led me to discover many epic-sounding wargames that'd take too much effort to acquire and play: with legit physical versions too hard to get, I'd have to adapt and print the board & other contents or do it all in my computer. I did, however, encounter a handful of games specifically built for printing and easy use. They include:

>Battle for Moscow
Classic wargame from a veteran designer, Frank Chadwick who's even a boardgamegeek.com member. German player gets to choose his starting unit disposition, while the Soviet player has, with a single exception, just a single unit type. German player must capture and hold Moscow by the end of seven turns, with mechanics for mud and Siberian reinforcements, aswell as German armored movement and Soviet rail movement.

I only realized War's (>>12874) combat system was slow and clunky while playing this; attacker/defender strength ratios and results determined by a single dice roll + looking up a table of results is infinitely more sophisticated than War's method of repeatedly comparing the results of two d6 to eliminate each individual unit.

But although it's fun and simple, its fun rapidly dried up after repeated solitaire plays, all of which ended in a Soviet victory. Maybe solitaire play is completely impractical or I haven't correctly understood some rule.

>Eastern Front 2
Designed by Philip Sabin, a lucky assburger who gets to write articles on wargaming (see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/people/professors/sabin/index.aspx) to be as simple as possible and still produce realistic simulation results. Players start in either 1941 or 1943, with minor changes possible to test alt-historical scenarios, and play out the entire war,
The Axis can nominally win if it can take 2 of 3 major Soviet cities -Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow, but that's impossible unless the German player is exceptionally lucky in his rolls. Therefore, he has two other victory possibilities -holding out until late 1945 spring and capturing a certain proportion of the hexes bordering Siberia.
Units, hexes and game turns are massive in scale and thus few in number. Industrial zones are destroyed if taken by the enemy and can never be rebuilt, a confusing rule to a normalfag fellow player. Each side's stacking limit is fixed for every turn, artificially representing many factors that couldn't be organically simulated due to the game's simplicity.

Overall, although entertaining and ellegantly designed, it's a weak choice for repeated plays due to its simplicity and for being designed primarily to prove the author's points rather than being a fun game.