Within an hour of unpacking and flipping through Little Saturn we determined we would choose a scenario and set it up that night. Little did we know it would remain set up for a month!

Is this the biggest scenario in all of PG-dom? With 6 maps and something around 400 combat units/transports it must be in the running. Set up and the first turn took almost two hours, and we closed shop for the night, not meeting again until 4 or 5 days later. This is the way the game would go...play a turn or two, walk away for 4 or 5 days, play a couple turns...etc. It was an ordeal, but well worth doing, for sure.

The Italian/German forces are, typically, smaller in number than the Soviet juggernaut that seems to enter several companies of units each turn for the first several turns, and it is quickly apparent that the Axis plan will be to delay the progress of the Soviet forces. There's not much else to hope for. The Soviet has 24 turns to achieve 3 or 4 of 4 Victory goals: - destroy 40+ Axis steps - control three villages - exit 7 tanks off map (about halfway across the map from the Sov entry point) - have 7 tanks on the West edge of the playing area (after entering from the East, three maps away)

As the Soviet player I just tried to keep things moving, swarming the towns with assault stacks and leap-frogging my arty and AT teams. Rich, the Axis player, carefully placed high-morale leaders in the villages, knowing they could buy an extra turn or two if assault combat could be drawn out with some timely rallies. He also did a great job positioning his mortars and long-range arty; every turn I had to look forward to 45 points of Italian shells raining down on a single stack , and by turn 24 I was still 5 hexes away from those darn guns!

Mistakes were made. I had split off a considerable force to the South to try and sneak around to the exit point (see third Victory condition, above) but Rich had me covered pretty well and it took 10 turns just to get out the forest on the South-east corner. In fact, any and all areas where the Axis chose to dig their heels in seemed to take ages to clear out. They would lose a lot of units, but would gain valuable time. Eventually, with his force pool down to perhaps 15-20%, little or no armour and the three "Victory towns" in Soviet hands, things looked grim for the Italo-Germans...but the delaying strategy had paid off; turn 24 came and went with the Soviets 4 tanks short of Victory conditions 3 and 4, resulting in a Minor Victory for the Italian side.

Good fun, a real head scratcher at times, but a fair bit longer than I would normally choose to take with a single scenario. We'll try a few smaller ones, now.