Introduction

This blog is my site for recording my Barbarossa miniature wargame campaign. It is intended to document a wargame campaign covering the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 - Operation Barbarossa.

Years ago (in 1988 - My God! That was twenty years ago!) Game Designer's Workshop (GDW) published a campaign supplement to their Command Decision wargame rules, called "Barbarossa 25". I've always been fascinated reading this supplement and contemplating its staging.


In this campaign supplement, everything is scaled down, roughly, by a factor of 25. Thus 25 kilometers of Russia terain became one kilometer of wargame terrain, each 25 divisions were represented ("bathtubbed") down to a single division, and a month was reduced to a single day.

Now that still resulted in an awful lot of troops - the initial German invasion force was three entire infantry divisions, one panzer division, plus all the assorted supporting troops and miscellaneous units. The Russians had about double this (hordes of lower quality troops).

Now I game solo most of the time, and can't commit to a regular gaming schedule due to the demands of real life, so Barbarossa 25 is clearly beyond my capabilities to stage - I wouldn't be able to fight a single campaign day's combat in a month of real time.

So I decided to scale Barbarossa down even further, from a scale of 1/25 to 1/75, so that is how Barbarossa 75 was born.