I'm playing the Axis, Alex is playing both Allied factions. This is our third TK2 game.... We called the first after the Axis got bogged down in the Balkans during Barbarossa, leading to a situation where a Tukh-763-led summer Uranus was promising to retake Kiev and drop Tide down to 1 (possibly before the No Retreat Marker gets planted) while the Brits had almost cleared Libya. The second game was about to get to Limited War when we received the massive update to the playtest kit and so we dropped that to start this one.
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What happened, roughly:
'37: Brits tried to get Belgium over the summer, and failed. The Axis and Soviet maximally pushed in the Civil War, and ended up having zero net effect. Stalin Line got played in Fall.
'38: The soviets and Axis both only play one Support card this year; the axis in the summer, while the Soviets used their summer for Five-Year Plan and the West did Little Entente. Austria is ceded in the fall. I believe the Civil War ended in the summer, leading to the Soviet Fall Support card being wasted.
'39: Czechoslovakia is conquered in Spring, just before the West Guarantees. Axis plays the N/S Pact for the summer; West uses that summer for Scandinavian League. The soviets Demand Rumania and Finland. The Germans Mobilize over the winter, getting 1 conditional step per turn.
'40: Axis plays its last Supports Nationalist to remove yet another Pro-Allied marker from the map... they were *everywhere* this game. Soviets take the Baltics in spring, then use Initiative in the Summer to take out Rumania and Bulgaria; more careful planning would probably have served up Hungary as well. [This was before the soviet Purges political cards were changed to produce Axis Neutrals Pressured results when they blew their die roll. It wasn't important for this season, as all three 50/50 die rolls were made, but in the future....] In the winter, they notice Balkan Pact and play it. Germany uses the summer to Continue Mobilization with its total of 3&9 replacements, then demands the polish corridor in the fall. The Poles resist as a WAllied minor, and limwar breaks out. Case Red is played in the winter to clinch the outbreak of war in time to play a summer Yellow conquers D-N.
'41: The Soviets comintern in Spring, but get just a single Pressures Neutrals result and nothing else. [We missed the fact that Comintern is tossed if you go with the Political Purges.] Germany goes with LWP and then Yellow. The second summer turn sees both Paris and London fall. This result was largely because WAllied delay rolls were absolute crap in this time frame and the Luftwaffe rolled one or two 1's. We screwed up when LimWar cards are added to hands, and thus the Brits didn't mobilize until Spring... but the RAF rolled a 6, which means it wouldn't have shown up until the third turn of summer even with a winter play, which was too late. If there'd been one more WAllied support unit available, I might not have invaded out of fear that my plan for Paris would fail and I'd need an air shift to get it in the third turn.... Another factor contributing to London's fall was that on the first turn of summer, the French Navy sailed into the North Sea because Alex misunderstood the rules and thought that doing so would prevent an Axis beachhead in the North Sea.... So, I got hugely lucky here, and picked up that Albatross known as "garrisoning Britain." I did get to kill a fairly large number (6?) of British steps in the process of taking southern Britain, at least.
The Soviet summer card was Molotov Diplomacy (though it was called Soviet Expansionism back then). The Soviets had Bessarabia, Finnish Frontier, and the northern half of the Baltic States for Ceded Borders, giving them a 50/50 shot at a Neutrality result with each turn. The target was Turkey, who had a pro-allied Neutrality marker on it at the time. The Soviets blew their first two rolls, and this was before the card was modified to give the Axis a Neutrals Pressured result on a blown roll. They succeeded on their third roll, picking up Turkey as a Soviet Ally.
This is where our first session ended. In our second session...
