Game of the Week, February 9-15

This week’s Game of the Week puts you at squad level on the Eastern Front from the opening shock of Barbarossa to the ruins of Stalingrad. Squad Battles: Advance of the Reich is available at 25% off from February 9 through February 15. It covers actions across 1941 and 1942, from fast-moving summer advances and desperate rearguards to winter fighting, river lines, and close-quarters combat in villages, factories, and city blocks—where a single machine-gun position or anti-tank gun can decide the pace of an entire attack. The game comes with major 2D and 3D graphics updates. Additional information about this update can be found below.

From Barbarossa To Stalingrad

On 22 June 1941, Germany opened Operation Barbarossa with a wager: that the Soviet Union could be knocked out in a single campaigning season. It was not simply a war of territory, but a war of time. German planning assumed the Red Army could be shattered near the frontier, that Soviet command would collapse under the speed of the advance, and that political and economic pressure would finish what battlefield victories began. The initial results seemed to justify the gamble. Whole Soviet formations were encircled in the border battles, forward airfields with aircraft caught on the ground, and the German spearheads drove deep into a country whose size was measured in weeks of marching, not days.

But the same scale that promised a decisive victory also created an operational trap. Every kilometer gained stretched supply columns, wore out vehicles, and thinned the infantry that had to protect flanks, secure road junctions, and reduce pockets of bypassed resistance. The Wehrmacht could deliver powerful local blows, yet it had to do so repeatedly across multiple axes, while its logistics depended on a limited road network, captured railways of a different gauge, and a constant struggle to supply fuel and ammunition faster than it was being consumed. At the tactical level—where Advance of the Reich lives—those strategic facts translate into a familiar pattern: assaults that begin with confidence, then slow as coordination frays, casualties mount, and supporting weapons lag behind the point of contact.

German Panzer IV Tank, 1941 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-351-1427-21A / Public Domain)

In 1941, the Soviets were battered, but not finished. Units disintegrated, then reappeared as new formations; commanders learned brutally in real time; and the state accepted losses that would have ended many other armies. The front bent, sometimes broke, but did not disappear. As the summer turned to autumn, terrain and weather became combatants of their own. The Rasputitsa mud season reduced movement to a crawl and forced vehicles onto a handful of roads where ambushes, artillery, and simple congestion could paralyze an advance. Then winter arrived early and hard. Men fought while freezing, engines failed, weapons jammed, and both sides learned that exposure could kill as surely as bullets.

By autumn 1941, the strategic center of gravity shifted toward Moscow. The drive on the capital—Operation Typhoon—was meant to end the campaign by decapitating the Soviet system. German forces achieved large encirclements, yet the effort also exposed the limits of their endurance. Front-line units were exhausted, replacements were uneven, and supply lines were at their longest just as the weather turned worst. When the Soviet counteroffensive struck in December, it revealed another uncomfortable truth: the Red Army could still generate operational shock. The Germans held on through improvised defenses and stubborn local actions, but the dream of a quick war was gone. The front would not end with a single blow; it would become a grinding contest of attrition, mobility, and industrial output.

Soviet Anti-Aircraft Gunners, Sevastopol (Nikolay Asnin / Public Domain)

In 1942, Germany tried to recover the initiative with a new plan: focus south, seize resources, and cut Soviet arteries. The summer offensive (often grouped under “Case Blue”) aimed toward the Don, the Caucasus oil fields, and the Stalingrad region. It began with renewed momentum. Soviet defeats around Kharkov in the spring created openings, and German mobile forces again showed the power of concentration at a point of decision. Yet the same familiar problems returned—only larger. The further the advance went, the more the offensive split into competing objectives, and the more combat power was consumed simply keeping the army moving. The southern front also relied heavily on allied formations—Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops—often tasked with holding extended sectors that would later become critical.

Hauptmann Wilhelm Traub with Russian PPSch 41 in the ruins of Stalingrad; late autumn 1942 (Bundesarchiv Bild 116-168-618 / Public Domain)

Stalingrad became the symbol and the trap. What began as a campaign objective—secure the Volga corridor, protect the northern flank of the drive into the Caucasus, disrupt Soviet transport—evolved into a battle of prestige and will. The city’s geography turned warfare into brutal micro-terrain: factory halls, rail embankments, cellars, rubble piles, and riverbanks where lines ran through buildings rather than across maps. In such conditions, battlefield “fronts” became a patchwork of strongpoints and infiltration routes. Small-unit leadership, fieldcraft, and the effective use of machine guns, mortars, and engineers were disproportionately important. A single block could be attacked and counterattacked repeatedly; a strong building could anchor an entire local defense; and artillery observers, snipers, and assault groups shaped the fight as much as any grand maneuver.

The Soviet response in late 1942 was not simply to fight inside the city, but to set the terms for a decisive operational reversal. In November, Operation Uranus struck at the weaker Axis-held flanks, aiming to encircle the German Sixth Army and associated forces. The success of the encirclement exposed the strategic fragility of the 1942 plan: advancing deep while relying on stretched, unevenly equipped allied units to hold the shoulders of the breakthrough. Once the pocket formed, the battle shifted again. Stalingrad was no longer just a fight for a city; it became a fight for supply routes, airfields, and relief corridors, as German forces tried to sustain and then rescue an encircled army while Soviet forces tightened the ring.

Elsewhere in 1942, the Eastern Front showed how wide this war really was. Operations such as the fighting around the Rzhev salient and efforts like Operation Mars underscored that the struggle was not a single linear narrative from west to east, but a series of overlapping offensives, local crises, and high-casualty battles that consumed men and matériel at an industrial pace. For players, that broader context explains why so many engagements—whether a hasty defense in a village, an assault across open steppe, or a desperate fight at a river line—carry a sense of urgency. By late 1942, both sides had learned that battles could be won tactically yet prove strategically ruinous if they exhausted their forces, squandered the initiative, or created vulnerabilities the opponent could exploit.

Soviet Troops, Stalingrad (Imperial War Museums / CC BY-NC-SA)

Squad Battles: Advance of the Reich sits within that hinge of the war: the period when German operational methods could still produce dramatic gains but no longer guaranteed a decision, and when the Red Army was transforming—through hard experience—into an increasingly effective instrument of large-scale war. The road from June 1941 to the winter of 1942 was not a single “advance,” but a sequence of collisions between ambition and reality: distance, weather, logistics, resilience, and the brutal arithmetic of casualties.

The narrative is continued in Red Victory

Squad Battles Graphical Updates

Advance of the Reich has also been brought up to the current Squad Battles visual standard. It includes the updated graphics set: cleaner, more transparent unit and terrain artwork, rebuilt map elements (trees, brush, fields, walls, and other hexside details), and brand-new Eastern Front building graphics created specifically for this title—plus refreshed city and factory visuals to better match the scale of Squad Battles maps. Multiple seasonal “biomes” are included as well (summer, fall, barren, and snow), so the look of the battlefield shifts with the conditions.

You can find additional information about the new graphics update here.

What's in the Game

Advance of the Reich includes 113 Scenarios – covering all sizes and situations, including specialized versions for both head to head play and vs. the computer AI.

Included are a range of maps, with Stalingrad (56,316 hexes) featured from the Grain Elevator to the Tractor Factory

The Order of Battle includes German, German SS, Russian, Russian Guards, Italian, Romanian, Militia, and Russian Naval soldiers.

Extensive documentation, including two 147-page Visual Order of Battle documents and a 32-page Vehicle and Weapon Encyclopedia.

Unit component, Order of Battle, and Scenario Editors, which allow players to customize the game.

Map & Sub-map editors allow map creation and any of the included maps to be "chopped" up into smaller segments for custom scenario creation.

Advance of the Reich provides multiple play options, including play against the computer AI, Play by E-mail (PBEM), LAN & Internet "live" play, and two-player hot seat.

The game has been updated to the most recent patch, which includes an extensive graphics overhaul. See the changelog for all changes.

Books

Here you can find a list book detailing the historical background of the game. (Clicking the book covers brings you to Amazon).

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Revised ed. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Stahel, David. Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Stahel, David. Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Mawdsley, Evan. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. Armageddon in Stalingrad: September–November 1942. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009.

Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

Bull, Stephen. World War II Infantry Tactics: Squad and Platoon. Elite 105. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004.

Bull, Stephen. World War II Infantry Tactics: Company and Battalion. Elite 124. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2006.

Screenshots

Last but not least, below are some screenshots of the game. As with the entire Squad Battles series, this title has two 2D views and two 3D views to choose from. (Clicking the image shows you an enlarged version) As mentioned, you can find additional screenshots and information about the new graphic update here.

We hope you enjoy this week’s Game of the Week: Squad Battles: Advance of the Reich. Like all WDS titles, it provides countless hours of rich gameplay at a very attractive price.

Note for existing owners of Advance of the Reich: The latest patch must be applied to a clean 4.03.1 installation—do not patch over the 4.03.4 Beta, as the beta includes extra files that will cause graphical corruption. If you previously installed the beta, we strongly recommend downloading the full 4.03.4 installer from your store account and doing a fresh install.