Are We The Baddies? An Undaunted: Stalingrad Review

It’s interesting that the Undaunted series works as well as it does. I’m intrigued by war games but I’ll admit sometimes they can be a bit dry when compared to their non-war brothers and sisters. The focus is less on the art and more on the historical accuracy. And for good reason, I think. Ironically, war isn’t a game (to most people) and thus shouldn’t be treated as such by adding big colors and cartoon drawings. It’s to be taken seriously. But people need to be drawn in to some degree. For most war games, it’s my interest in the historical time period that brings me there. For every other game, it’s the art. We eat with our eyes, as the saying goes. The Undaunted series straddles this fine line well. The map layout is mostly just brown and grey, but what else could it be? I still find it more appealing than a map of hexes. But more than that, the battle of Stalingrad speaks for itself. I’ve had a strange fascination with this battle for quite some time now, long before I picked this game up. The terms “atrocities” and “horrors of war” are almost synonymous with this battle, but for a woman like me, born in 1990, what could I possibly know about that? I’ve grown up in one of the longest peace-times in all of human history. I literally can’t even picture these horrors because my mind doesn’t know what to conjure. How fortunate am I that I don’t even have to think about what I don’t know. And yet, something beckons me to look.

Stalingrad was a cavalcade of human suffering. And frankly, had the Axis not lost 800,000 lives in this single battle, the world may in fact look much worse today. As if that’s not enough, there was an estimated 1.1 million Russian soldiers lost with an additional 40,000 civilians. What makes this such a difficult story to tell is it’s not a good vs. evil story we all understand. It’s more of an evil vs. evil-that-didn’t-directly-effect-the-rest-of-the-world-yet story. And yet, the 1.9 million people laying in the snow of southern Russia were not all evil. Many were just pawns in an evil regime. Many people in those armies could have been you or me, had we been born in a different time and place. I think that’s what we forget so easily about World War II. In general, it is easy to paint Hitler and Stalin as 2-D cartoon villains, because in many ways they were. Intentional mass slaughter of innocent civilians is objectively evil. But something about these men is lost in this way. It turns them into “boogy men”, obscuring how it came to be that two such men rose in the first place. I think of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which illustrates to me how each of us has the same capacity for the evil we see in others.

I think Undaunted: Stalingrad helps reclaim some of this humanity in the way it tells its story. It gives you some of the nitty-gritty details but keeps a bird’s eye view of Stalingrad’s lessons. Like any war game, it is heavily tactical and your moves require careful consideration. But even when diving into the minutia of war tactics, it still maintains that historical and human lens.

I can’t sing the praises of this game enough. I’m picky when it comes to deck builders. I will create some enemies with this but Dune: Imperium was not for me. I still can’t figure out what everyone loves about that game. The deck building in the Undaunted system is good because you notice it. In D:I, it would take forever before I came across the expensive card I just bought. In Undaunted, I feel it when my poor reserves are at bat and I can’t take that move action I was banking on because his legs were blown off or something. And I also notice when my veteran machine gunner has the experience to give me a more powerful action at a crucial moment. It makes it so much more impactful when you’re seeing the individual play out the military tactics you employ, for better or worse. You can clearly feel that Stalingrad was a battle of attrition. Your men are unrelentingly worn down in encounter after encounter. Certainly some of the scenarios are unbalanced, but if you’ve bought in to experiencing some of what Stalingrad was, this makes sense. There’s a real tension not only in how to build your deck, but initiative bidding as well. If you want to go first, you probably need to give up a powerful action.

Then there’s the branching campaign that’s re-settable. Osprey understands that if I’m going to drop $120 on a board game, I want it to last. My God, this game is good. I’m looking at it right now and it’s all coming back to me. If you like tactics in a changing landscape that still manages to hit emotional beats, you will like this game. It helps to know a little something of the Battle of Stalingrad before you play, but this may drive you to look into it in the first place. This battle in particular is worthy of contemplation. One of the best books I read on it was Enemy at the Gates (which happens to have a movie named after it). Unfortunately Jude Law was not as heavily featured in the book, but still worth your time I’d say. And on that note, where the heck is the Jude Law card? Talk about a missed opportunity.

Undaunted: Stalingrad drew me in in a way that other “ecosystem” type games haven’t. Again, I may lose some of you here but the Arkham Horror, Marvel Champions, Sleeping Gods etc. narrative worlds tried very hard to make the story interesting. And for some reason, for me it just wasn’t. To be fair, these are board games, so they have their limits. But the lighter narrative of U:S, grounded in an event that actually happened, provided that hook in a more subtle but more captivating way. I’ve experienced some significant medical trials over the last 2 years that have affected me almost daily. And this isn’t a “dear diary” woe-is-me post, but it’s important because this was the driver for my contemplation on human suffering. And Stalingrad has provided me with some context. It puts the fact that people have gone through much worse front and center. And perhaps I can transform some of my despair into becoming a more grateful person. We all hold different sufferings in our lives and they will hit us at one point or another. It’s best to be prepared for this. Suffering has the power to be transformative, but it also has the power to turn us inwards and make us selfish. It’s not something we think about often, but much of our true character is on display in the midst of suffering. And I think only by consciously engaging with that idea can we prepare ourselves to take control of the outcome. It’s important we take our preoccupation with suffering seriously. It’s a serious business.

With all that said, any game that brings all this to mind for me has done something right. Thank you to Osprey for such a moving experience.

Quick Pros and Cons
Pros
-the deck building is so satisfying
-the card upgrades, map downgrades, new mechanic intros are smooth and keep you wanting more
-simple, smooth mechanics
-just enough narrative to provide a moving experience

Cons
-not a particularly colorful subject-matter (I mean that literally)
-expensive
-probably best paired with a historical interest, so if you don’t have it, start with one of the cheaper Undaunted games and see if you like the mechanics

TLDR: I don’t like Dune: Imperium or Arkham Horror (LCG) and that’s all you should take away from this.
Also, me at the end of this game: