Advance on the East front

Possibly translated as All Forward on the Eastern Front, this game covers the entirety of World War 1 in the East in 10 turns / about three hours. It is the companion game to the designer's take on the Western Front in WW1, All Quiet on the Western Front. The card backs in both games say Storm Over Europe, and the two games can be combined to play out the whole of WW1 in Europe. A few powerful German armies face a ponderous Russian juggernaut, while their Austro-Hungarian allies are threatened on all sides by Italians, Serbs, and Rumanians. The game is on the high strategic scale with corps and army units fighting a cross a map running from Frankfurt to Moscow, from Riga to the Dardanelles. Each turn is six months, with ten turns covering the entire war. The game system is a distant derivation of the "area-impulse" mechanic created in Storm Over Arnhem. Units are activated by group in a single area, and may generally move or attack but not both before becoming "spent". Spent units are more vulnerable to attack. Storm Over Europe uses a card-driven system for activation, with each side getting varying amounts of cards each turn. The cards generally allow special moves or combinations that break the standard rules of the game, or provide events that shape the strategic outlook. Players choose their hand each turn from a pool of sixteen Operations cards. Special Strategic cards are added to the pool once a turn from the third turn on; these bring new countries into the war, allow special tactics like poison gas, or provide game-turning events like the Russian Revolution. The rules are only seven pages, and the game is simple and fast enough to play in a short evening.