Step inside the shrine of serious computer wargaming and a grey-bearded acolyte will eventually press a single 3½-inch disk into your palm. Boot it, he whispers, and dare to marshal a million cardboard corps. That disk is Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia, a design so devoted to authenticity it makes you convert Soviet railways one hex at a time. Bizarre or classical? Think Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” performed on a monochrome CRT. Underrated or overrated? An FPS fan might call it Excel with tanks; an Eastern-Front grognard will lapse into rapture about Smolensk railheads. Fundamental or disposable? It’s the gnarled trunk that feeds branches like Panzer General, Hearts of Iron, and Grigsby’s own War in the East. Our through-line today is that cursed rail gauge, the extra three inches of Soviet track that, in game terms, turns every dash on Moscow into a slow-motion logistical face-plant.
Historical Context
By 1993 Strategic Simulations Inc. had become Silicon Valley’s resident war college. Designer Gary Grigsby was already legendary for Kampfgruppe and the original 1984 War in Russia, then revisited the campaign in 1990’s Second Front: Germany Turns East. Unsatisfied with that interface, he tore the project apart, added full VGA support, streamlined menus, sharpened the AI, bundled a scenario editor, and re-launched the result under his own name. The new box boasted “Weekly Turns, 20-Mile Hexes, 225 Weeks of Combat,” proudly ignoring the CD-ROM fireworks dominating the era.
While Doom prepared to redefine action games and Myst teased photorealistic islands, War in Russia shipped on a single high-density disk backed by a manual thick enough to stun livestock. In my local Electronics Boutique it lingered beside Falcon 3.0, an aisle the clerks unofficially called the Dad Shelf. I spent a summer job’s paycheck on it, expecting a quick blitzkrieg, and instead found myself copying rail-conversion tables in pencil because the manual claimed that would “speed play.” That was the moment I realised I’d joined a different religion.
SSI’s marketing leaned into fresh post-Cold-War curiosity. CNN was broadcasting walk-throughs of rusting Soviet tank parks; SSI invited you to refight the entire campaign, factory evacuations and all, without the dining-table sprawl of classic board games like SPI’s The Russian Campaign.
Mechanics
Choose VGA at the setup prompt and a muted beige map appears: the whole Eastern Front in 20-mile hexes, each turn representing one week from June 1941 to July 1945. Units are corps-level, except Soviet “corps,” which actually equate to armies thanks to mid-war reorganisations. Movement is arrow-key choreography; hit E to execute and combat results flash as terse percentages, behind them lurk supply algorithms worthy of an accounting degree.
The star mechanic is rail conversion. German engineers flip captured track from 1 435 mm to the 1 520 mm Soviet gauge at one hex per engineer per turn. Until the pink railhead creeps forward, panzers run on fumes. It’s equal parts history lesson and slapstick tragedy: plan a grand encirclement, then watch it bog down because a single rail hex near Vitebsk didn’t get repaired in time.
Supply phases model depots, truck points, attrition, and morale. Let spearheads outrun the rail and penalties cascade, halved movement, limp attack factors, breakdowns galore. Soviet commanders juggle factory relocations: ship too soon and industrial output dips, too late and the Luftwaffe bricks the workshops.
Weather wields a comedic sledgehammer. Autumn mud, the dreaded Rasputitsa, shrinks movement to a crawl. Winter halves Axis attack values unless cold-weather gear is stockpiled. Spring thaw then turns roads into chocolate pudding. Suddenly that drab VGA map feels alive, mocking your timetables with meteorological spite.
Air war lives in a sub-menu: assign rail-cutting, ground support, or strategic bombing. Overstack an airfield and operational losses spike. Few sights cheer a Soviet commander more than watching VVS carpet-bomb Axis satellite corps during Operation Uranus, their demise reported in stoic text pop-ups.
Scenarios scale from quick bites, Typhoon, Case Blue, to the five-year 1941 Grand Campaign. Play-by-e-mail fans spent months exchanging .TRN files; I know because my 14.4 kbps modem once lived that ordeal.
The interface is its own rite of passage. Soviet counters default to retina-searing magenta; Axis, to pale blue. Shortcut keys range from logical (A = air assignments) to esoteric (J toggles frozen-river crossings for reasons known only to the devs). The manual’s back page prints a quick-reference chart that becomes an altar piece taped beside the monitor.
Legacy and Influence
Reviewers lauded the scope yet winced at the austere presentation. Computer Gaming World’s M. Evan Brooks called it “a workmanlike simulation” and “essential for grognards who missed Second Front.” Despite modest sales, the design became a handshake in wargame circles: master this and you’d earned your stripes.
More importantly, its genetic code powered Grigsby’s later classics. Steel Panthers borrowed the terrain engine; War in the East lifted depot chains, weather, and those pesky rail gauges nearly wholesale.
The title found new life when Matrix Games issued a Windows-friendly, mouse-driven freeware edition in August 2000, inviting a generation raised on Pentium towers to taste its logistical anguish. To this day, Matrix forums hum with after-action reports debating whether Army Group South should bypass Kiev or storm Odessa before mud season.
Why didn’t it break out of niche status? The UI punishes casual clicks, the manual reads like a staff-college syllabus, and by ’93 many players equated “strategy” with real-time spectacle such as Dune II. Yet for those willing to climb its learning cliff, no other game conveys the Eastern Front’s brutal arithmetic, rail hex by rail hex, quite so vividly.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Fire up War in Russia on DOSBox and nothing looks impressive: sixteen-color counters, clacking menus, magenta Soviet blobs. But let the first snow blanket Smolensk, watch fuel gauges bleed as railheads lag behind, and suddenly you’re sweating like a quartermaster, praying the Volga freezes before 3rd Guards Tank Army arrives. That’s magic no polygon count can match. Bizarre yet classical, under-appreciated outside hardcore circles yet foundational within them, it remains the Eastern-Front master class. 9.0 / 10. Because sometimes three extra inches of railway track decide the fate of world history, and no other game makes you feel that truth quite like this one.