Games of the Week, Sept 28-Oct 14

From September 28 through October 4, this week's Game of the Week is First World War Campaigns: East Prussia '14, on sale for one week. It takes players to the Eastern Front's violent opening campaign: a vast, mobile contest in which German commanders used railways, intelligence, and interior lines to turn an invasion of Prussia into a disaster for one Russian army.

The campaign makes every delay and every report matter. German commanders must decide when to commit their limited forces, where to use the railways, and how much danger to accept while concentrating against one Russian army. The Russian player faces the opposite problem: keep two widely separated armies advancing in concert, before German interior lines can turn their numerical advantage against them.

The Invasion of East Prussia

When war began in August 1914, Germany's strategic plan placed its greatest weight in the west. The German armies that crossed Belgium and Luxembourg were intended to defeat France quickly before Russia could bring its immense but slowly mobilizing forces fully into action. East Prussia, the exposed German province between the Baltic and the Russian frontier, was therefore entrusted to the Eighth Army. It was a comparatively small force, expected to delay rather than to win a great campaign if Russian numbers became overwhelming.

Russia, however, had promised its French ally an early offensive. The task fell to two armies separated by the difficult country of the Masurian Lakes. General Paul von Rennenkampf's First Army would advance west from the Niemen, while General Alexander Samsonov's Second Army moved north from the Narew. The intended convergence threatened the Germans from two directions. Königsberg, the province's great city and fortified centre, lay in their path; beyond it stood the political and psychological danger of Russian troops in Prussia itself.

«На фронте противник выдвигает сильную артиллерию, вплоть до тяжелой артиллерии, стараясь получить перевес в огне…»

“At the front the enemy is bringing up powerful artillery, including heavy artillery, seeking to gain superiority by fire…”

— Pavel von Rennenkampf, report to General Nikolai Yanushkevich, 8/21 August 1914.

The plan was formidable on a map, but its execution depended on coordination across a broad, broken theatre. Lakes, forests, poor roads, and the distance between the two Russian armies made close cooperation difficult. Their communications were often insecure. German officers, meanwhile, knew their own railway network intimately and could move formations from one threatened sector to another far more quickly than troops marching overland. Those advantages did not remove the danger, but they made a counterstroke possible if the Russian armies could be dealt with separately.

The opening encounters showed how uncertain the campaign would be. On 17 August, in one of those small ironies history occasionally provides, a German general named Hermann von François led I Corps against the Russians at Stallupönen, winning a local success before withdrawing. Three days later, at Gumbinnen, the Germans attacked Rennenkampf’s advancing army. The battle produced hard fighting and serious losses, and the German commander, General Maximilian von Prittwitz, feared that the Eighth Army might be trapped between the two Russian forces. His suggestion that the army retreat behind the Vistula was unacceptable in Berlin. Prittwitz was removed; Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff were sent east to take command.

Their arrival has often given the campaign a simple heroic shape, but the decisive opportunity had already been identified by staff officers, particularly Max Hoffmann. Russian radio traffic and reports from the front indicated that Samsonov was advancing north-westward with Second Army while Rennenkampf remained farther east. The Germans could use rail to concentrate against Samsonov before First Army intervened. It was a bold calculation: a misread of Russian movements, or a determined advance by Rennenkampf, could leave the concentrating German corps dangerously exposed.

From 26 August, the Germans struck at Samsonov's flanks and communications. François attacked from the west; other German corps pressed the Russian centre and right. The fighting conventionally called Tannenberg was not a single, neat clash but a sequence of engagements around the villages, roads, and forests south-west of Allenstein. Samsonov's troops fought hard and repeatedly tried to break free, yet the encirclement tightened as German formations shifted by rail and road. Orders arrived late or not at all, units lost contact with neighbours, and the Second Army's retreat routes became clogged.

By the end of August, much of Samsonov's army had been killed, wounded, captured, or scattered. Samsonov himself died while attempting to escape the encirclement. Tannenberg was a severe defeat, but it did not end the Russian threat. Rennenkampf's First Army still stood in East Prussia. In early September, the Germans turned back east in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. Pressed by attacks on its front and flank, First Army withdrew toward the frontier. The Germans had recovered their province, but they had not destroyed Russia's capacity to fight; the Eastern Front would remain a theatre of immense movement and attrition.

For the commanders on both sides, the campaign demonstrated the limits as well as the possibilities of rapid manoeuvre. A railway concentration could create a local superiority, but only if staffs understood the enemy's position and formations arrived in the right order. A broad advance could threaten a province, but it could also lengthen communications and leave corps exposed on distant roads. Those are the tensions that make the campaign rewarding to revisit from either side of the map.

„Soldaten der 8. Armee! Die vieltägigen heißen Kämpfe auf den weiten Gefilden zwischen Allenstein und Neidenburg sind beendet. Ihr habt einen vernichtenden Sieg über 5 Armeekorps und 3 Kavalleriedivisionen errungen.“

“Soldiers of the 8th Army! The many days of fierce fighting on the wide fields between Allenstein and Neidenburg are over. You have won a crushing victory over five army corps and three cavalry divisions.”

— Paul von Hindenburg, message to the Eighth Army, 31 August 1914.

East Prussia '14 follows that story beyond the famous encirclement. Its East Prussian operations let players confront the initial invasion, the battles of Stallupönen and Gumbinnen, Tannenberg, and First Masurian Lakes. The game also reaches into the struggle for Poland, including Łódź, and the winter fighting of the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes in 1915. The central challenge remains the same: can the German player concentrate against one army without leaving the other an opening, or can the Russian player keep the invasion on schedule long enough to make German interior lines irrelevant?

What's in the Game

• East Prussia '14 includes 20 Scenarios, 4 Campaigns and 3 Grand Campaigns – covering all sizes and situations, including a solo tutorial scenario. All can be played head-to-head and vs. the computer AI.
• Multiple maps covering Lodz, the Masurian Lakes, and all of East Prussia.
• The order of battle file covers the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian forces that participated in the campaign
• Order-of-Battle, Parameter Data, and Scenario Editors, which allow players to customize the game.
• The sub-map feature allows the main map to be subdivided into smaller segments for custom scenario creation.
• Design notes which cover the production of the game, campaign notes, and a bibliography that includes the sources used by the First World War Campaigns team to produce this simulation game.
• East Prussia '14 provides multiple play options, including play against the computer AI, Play by E-mail (PBEM), LAN & Internet "live" play, as well as two-player hot seat.

For Panzer Campaigns players, the familiar 1 km hexes, two-hour turns, movement and fire routines, headquarters, fatigue, and supply systems make the interface immediately legible. First World War Campaigns shifts the emphasis to its period: large headquarters cannot be shifted casually without disrupting command, wireless intercepts can expose an enemy HQ, and cavalry can still charge when mounted. Rail schedules, imperfect information, and the pace of armies on foot, therefore, matter as much as a sharp local attack.

Book and Video recommendations

Buttar, Prit. Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in 1914. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2014.

Foley, Robert T. German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Showalter, Dennis E. Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914. Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2004.

Stone, David R. The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914–1917. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Watson, Alexander. Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

 

Screenshots

We hope you enjoy this week's Game of the Week: East Prussia '14. Like all WDS titles, it provides countless hours of rich historical gameplay at a very attractive price.