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[Servant Corps]

TAVKA-OKH is quite unlike any other wargame, in fact I’m not even sure it is a wargame. STAVKA-OKH is a game that is partly about strategy, partly about percentages, but really about decision making, player identity and the verdicts of history.

You can play a game in a matter of minutes, so I recommend you do so before you finish reading this post. It’s free. Read the rules carefully, since it’s an odd game.

First, you are a senior general in one of the totalitarian armies on the Eastern Front; the game chooses for you when you start up. You don’t assign the forces that are given to you – you only choose between three possible plans of attack. Each of these plans has a strength or a weakness strategically depending on the enemy plan, and each has different odds of being overruled entirely by the dictator.

So, the only real choice you make that can decide the outcome of the war can be regularly invalidated by your political master. Any decisions you make are contingent.

Success earns you glory, failure costs glory – unless the dictator has overridden your plan. If it’s his bright idea, then he reaps the rewards or penalties. If you think the Germans are going to steamroll you anyway, pick a plan you know Stalin will hate and let him look like a loser. And then you turn the war around with your genius. Right?

This is where the game gets even messier. If you take the role of your general seriously, there are two other variables to consider. First, do you support the party or not – doing so will add to your glory, failing to do so will subtract but each of these will also have an impact on the other variable, the verdict of history which is laid out at the bottom of the screen in each turn. If you take your “character” seriously, winning the war might not be enough or even what you want to happen. Because the war carries on around you.

Failing to win the war could lead to an honorable retirement. Or you could be hanged for war crimes. If you win the war, your politics might lead to you getting purged or exiled. Or maybe you become the heir to a brutal dictatorship responsible for genocide – the game never fails to remind you that Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars and millions of Jews and Poles and other Slavs are being killed. There are tallies for civilian casualties as well as military ones. A quick victory is in everyone’s interest, of course, but a gamble that fails will probably lead to your own head on the block.

Rod is one of those guys who loves the question of ethics in wargames. Be clear – there are no ethical choices to make here. If you try to waffle and try to avoid calling attention to yourself, you will avoid the hangman’s noose and the sword of Damocles, but you will also prolong the war leading to tens of millions of more deaths. If you fight well, but lose, you might be seen as a Rommel, I suppose – a general who avoided politics, but then Rommel didn’t survive the war, did he?

So we play a general, who ultimately has only the power of suggestion, being judged on the success or failure of plans he did not choose to begin with or approve in the end. And all around him is murder and savagery and criminality. But the war must be fought and the war must be won, or at least lost with energy.

STAVKA-OKH is not a game that I will come back to a lot. It’s an interesting experiment, and it’s cool to see the optional futures change as I gamble with my full throated support for the madman in power. And, like a lot of wargamers, I like to see how quickly I can get to Berlin or Moscow. It’s not a difficult game to win, and I think it’s easier to win if you just keep supporting the party, but that may just be my own luck.

But I felt a little dirty when Hitler said I could take over when he was gone.

Review: http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2011/07/15/stavka-okh/
Game: http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/STAVKA-OKH.html

[MonkeyHead]

This sounds very much like my kind of thing. Dowloading, will report back later!

[Akura]

Can't play it. Monitor resolution is too small.

[Biag]

I played around with it. Woohoo, Axis victory! ... I was really just happy about that, wasn't I.

[MonkeyHead]

Well, art imitates real life to some extent. First playthrough saw my Nazi forces camped deep into the USSR before steadily being pushed back. Desperate rearguard action was holding the line, then Hitler took over and Berlin fell. I was regarded as Germanys greatest tactician, and killed 22 million. Wow.

[Rakonas]

I tried to lose the war as a soviet, managed to win the war inadvertently.
The game is fun for a couple 2 minute playthroughs and then it's not really very interesting after that, unfortunately.

[Tarran]

I won the game as axis in the first try. I don't think I'll play it again for a while; it's just not a very replayable game.

[Flying Carcass]

This is neat! I'm currently playing as the soviets and am actively attempting to lose the war to escape execution/gulag. If we lose it says I'll become chairman of RussGas.

[baruk]

I was on the winning side of a Soviet victory in Summer 1946, and got appointed governor of the Ukraine (482 glory). A shade under 25 million dead.

[ExKirby]

I was on the winning side of a Soviet victory in Summer 1946, and got appointed governor of the Ukraine (482 glory). A shade under 25 million dead.

The shade obviously being the blood of the 25,000,000th Nazi with his head halfway through being disected by a Soviet axe when the game ended.

[Aqizzar]

Very first game - Oberkommander of the OHK.  I concentrated Hitler's insane invasion of Russia (and I made sure to tell him so) on Moscow, by way of a naval invasion of Leningrad.  The South is too large to invade effectively, we'll cut off the head and mop up the remains.  Der Fuhrer decided this plan wasn't aggressive enough, but listened to my advice about the expansive territory.  He insisted on a direct invasion of urban Russia, claiming Lithuania on the way, to stab straight at Moscow.  Though foolhardy, it was close enough to my original strategy to easily adapt.

A massive winter counterattack by Russian reinforcements put the security of the Fatherland in danger, when overconfident Soviet forces pushed all the way into Poland in Spring of 1942.  With threat of execution, by the Fuhrer or Soviets, I recognized this as the paper tiger it was, and obliterated the Soviet force with the largest pincer maneuver since the Napoleonic Wars.  The pitiful remnants of Russia's military managed to make a stand around Moscow, but with the snow thawed, victory was only a matter of time.

By the next Winter, as 1942 draws to a close, the Party's banners fly over the smoking shell of the Kremlin, and I rest assured in my eventual appointment as governor of the Reichskommisariat Ukraine.  Perhaps it was my continual dismissal of the Party's demands and crazy ideas that earned me a kingdom in a barren wasteland I pointedly ignored, but it's probably better than the diplomatic idiocy I was originally promised in relaying Germany's whimsical communiques around the globe to Japan.  They can deal with their own problems.

The final cost in death of what the historians are already calling "my" war is estimated at 9,464,214 (what delightfully Prussian precision).  They might remember me as a monster, mastermind of the deadliest invasion in human history, but I and my officers will always know the truth.  That it could have been so many more.

[cerapa]

I became the succesor to Stalin after doing a campaign of maximal flanking with great success while Stalin only did direct assaults and got badly beaten multiple times. 18 million casualties.

[Aqizzar]

I tried for the full Soviet Brown Nose.  Fully support the party, always take the plan of least political resistance (and Stalin still overruled me a couple times).  The Nazis win in Winter 1943, with Stalingrad still in play.  I "earned" -946 Glory, and retired as a touring minstrel in the German military scene.  My memoirs are best-sellers, stained with the blood of 18 million people.

[Hanzoku]

Interesting - I'm having trouble winning as the Germans, though I've won two games as the Russians. Generally every time I lose, I'm regarded as the best strategist of my country - I guess my underling Generals have had problems impleneting my grand vision or so.

[Rilder]

Just played an OKH Game, managed to win to the point I Succeeded Hitler. 13 Million Casualties.