Review by: Rob Zacny

Even after several weeks playing it, I am still learning how Gary Grigsby's War in the East works. The other night, I realized that fortifications spring up faster around a threatened city because the game models the efforts of civilian labor detachments. I also discovered why sometimes my attacks turn into reconnaissances-in-force. If I'm still playing a year from now, War in the East will still be yielding new secrets.

If I'm still playing, that is. War in the East is certainly large enough to hold my interest for the next year or longer. To borrow a term from book reviewers, it is a “magisterial" work that plays through four years of war, one week at a time. It models the action down to the last rifle squad and panzer variant. A single turn can take several hours to plot. But WitE is also an unapologetically traditional wargame that is defined by its sweeping scale and attention to detail, and it often seems in danger of snapping under its own weight.

Do not underestimate the appeal of WitE's colossal scale. Battles rage from the Polish-Russian border to the empty Russian steppes east of Moscow and all the way back to Berlin. The distances covered and the numbers of soldiers and units involved seem unreal. The casualty figures you get at the start of each turn quickly become astronomical, with millions of dead, wounded, and captured only a few months after Barbarossa. A huge armored push on the ground is preceded by an aerial battle that sucks in hundreds of fighters and bombers from both sides.

It's not just about the numbers, but the command and control needed to wield them. In the grand campaign, the front that is so large that it often seems like two or three different wars are playing out simultaneously. Deciding whether to cut your losses or double-down on an unexpectedly hard battle is more complicated when you have to consider the battle's potential impact on another sector hundreds of miles away, or how it might affect the war in the long run.

In addition to the usual tactical questions, you must carefully employ the "administrative points" that let you do things like stockpile supplies, refit units, and re-assign units to different HQs. It's easy for the chaos of combat to make a scramble of lines of authority, especially at the joints where one army or army group meets another, and if you let that chaos continue unchecked, units can be swept away from the headquarters units that support them with supplies and artillery. However, there are a limited number of administrative points to go around, and it is tough to know what takes priority.

These are all interesting and challenging questions, particularly when the delay of a turn might be the difference between a crushing encirclement or a bloody battle of attrition. However, War in the East is not a "best of the Eastern Front" game. It's the whole damned thing, and this is where the game's size and attention to detail begins working against it.