A thousand and one thanks once again to Justin, John, and the Beasts of War Team for another chance to ramble on the Weekender. 😀 While the articles themselves were discussed in a previous episode of XLBS, I think the team wanted to talk a little about the accompanying battle reports run in the forum thread, and so here we are.

These were the games actually run for the Barbarossa series, but of course there wasn’t room to include detailed battle reports in the articles themselves. And to avoid the “walls of text,” these reports are done almost entirely with a series of photos.

I wanted to also thank all the BoW community members who posted on these forums and kept the thread going, such as rasmus, jamesevans140, chrisg, yavasa, figure 11, witmann007, dorthonion, buggeroff, mamlukomar, victioriag, benc, warzan, limburger, iplay40k, torros, all the people who’ve shown so much interest and kept this thread going.

These battles were all run in Battlegroup, by Ironfist Publishing, available through Plastic Soldier Company, played in 15mm. We start off with some, ahh . . . **functional** tables. I mean, they get the point across. I’m happy to say they get better as the series progresses.

One “fudge” we kind of make with the rules in these battle reports is how the battle counter ratings worked. Normally when you have to draw a battle counter rating . . . again, these determine the overall, almost “psychological” condition of your battlegroup and how its mission is being perceived by higher levels of command, you keep these draws private. It’s part of the fog of war of the game. You always know how much damage you’ve taken, but you never really know how much damage you’re doing to the enemy. Anyway, in these particular battle reports, we’re showing those draws in the open to help the reader track what’s happening.

Of course, there could be a lot more to do in the Eastern Front. Like we say in the interview, this is the first five months of a war that would last just short of four years. 😀 After this, just as a sample of highlights, you have the Demyansk Pocket, Operation Carnivore, First Battle of Khar’kov, Case Blue, Stalingrad, Rhzev, Second Battle of Khar’kov, Third Battle of Khar’kov, Kursk, Orel-Belgorod, Kiev and the Dniepr Bend, Cherkassy, Bagration, Oder-Seelow, Berlin . . .

Seriously, this whole article series we’ve had is the first movie in a “nine-movie galactic saga.” This is barely scratching the surface (yes, I just compared my article series to the Phantom Menace ) . . . 🙁

So what’s next? Well . . . first up, we want to see how things unfold for Operation Zeus – the proposed Beasts of War campaign for an alternate mid or late war alternate-history World War 2 setting involving all the European factions. We want to follow up on the great success of Operation Flamestrike for Infinity and the Battle of Xilos for the Gates of Antares. I’m definitely excited to help and support Zeus in any way I can and certainly participate full-force in the campaign itself.

So I don’t want to get sunk too deep in anything else until we see where we stand with that. Meanwhile, some other alternate history ideas for World War II, my Leopards are coming in from Battlefront, and myself, @gladesunner, and some local gamers here in Fort Lauderdale have been putting together a pretty serious series of sci-fi armies of all things . . . so who knows?