Siege of Leningrad is a very simple solo wargame about the German siege of Leningrad in WW2, between 1941 and 1944. It is an abstract, logistical simulation, with the player reduced to a subtle balancing act between four key indexes measuring food, health, morale and the state of the city's defences.
I played most of this in the odd idle moment while on holiday in Croatia last year, and went back to it recently in a doomed effort to try to finish it. Siege of Leningrad is eminently portable and in this respect could be taken on holiday quite easily.
Each month is split into roughly 10 three day phases. The player rolls on a table with 1d6 constantly, to determine events in the siege, and can react in a limited way. In some respects, you feel a little bit like a spectator as much of the course of the siege is out of your hands.
The two main aspects of player agency are as follows:
Activity markers, of which you start with six, are your key tools in managing the siege. They are an in game currency which can be changed for logistic markers, to reduce the social fabric gauge, and to appeal to Stalin when the chips are really down.
The logistics markers are a big help, as they allow you to influence some critical dice rolls in your favour. Social fabric is usually at zero, but when it goes up to 4, or 3 in bad weather, bad things can happen to Leningrad. What you don't want is for things to get so bad that people start thinking about surrendering. It is pretty obvious that once you lose all your activity markers, things can go downhill fairly quickly. The trick is playing logistics tokens whenever it looks like social fabric is about to start causing issues.
This is really your main area of player agency, and consequently most of the action is just a process of sitting there, rolling your die, and watching how things progress, until there is a need to intervene. It is akin to watching something cooking on the stove and then stepping in to stir the pot now and again.
The only other area of player agency is when you are given a choice of which of the four key indexes to advance: this is usually going to be the defence index, largely because you can take more of a pounding here before things start to go wrong.
How did it play?
Between the start of the siege and January 1943 I had what could be best described as a pretty smooth ride of it. The dice were probably kind and I ended up with a surfeit of activity markers. These I almost always changed into logistics markers and spent them as and when social fabric was looking challenging. While it was the defences of Leningrad that took most of the punishment in 1941-42, there was little danger of the city being moved from its A-grade status.
The Germans really only have a chance of capturing the city once the status of Leningrad drops to C or below, and even then German victory is pretty remote until you get to L or below. As of January 1943 I was still rated an A, although my activity markers were dropping slowly. There were some moments in 1942 when the situation caused me to stop and ponder for a bit, largely to decide between advancing an index or just burning some more activity, but overall the choices were not really choices in my view.
Towards the end of the game, I finally ran out of activity markers and saw the defence of the city downgraded to a B and then a C, but by the late summer of 1943, I was within six months of the city being relieved by the Red Army. It would take a major fluke of the die for the Germans to capture Leningrad at this point.
There is a hint in the text that the game could be incorporated into a wider operational game, maybe a hex and counter simulation, of the fighting in the area of Leningrad, but I'm not really sure how this would work in practice, and indeed if it would really be worth the effort.
Overall I found it overly complex for what it was trying to achieve. There was also relatively little decision making for the player in terms of strategy. Siege games are, in my view, an excellent source of scenarios for the solo player, and Leningrad could provide the context for one, but I felt there was just too little player agency here.
The Siege of Leningrad is published by Minden Games and is available for purchase on Amazon at time of writing.
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