1A Games Tide of Iron: Stalingrad Expansion

Great expansion to ToI series. Top notch production and quality from 1A games. I really like the map boards depicting the city of Stalingrad. There's also some new pieces to convey some new rules to cover city fighting, including man hole covers to simulate sewer movement and specialization tokens covering unarmed units which can scavenge for weapons from other destroyed units. There's even tokens for starving units that must find food caches. Everything you need to replay the "Rattenkrieg", or War of the rats. Well worth the money.

I am giving this one star because I bought this and the rest of the expatiation's and the main game and 2 of the games are missing pieces. I tried to contact A1 Games and Fantasy Flight Games about replacement parts. It looks like A1 is no longer around and FFG just has not gotten back to me at all so I am giving this one star and telling you if you do buy the games just know if there is a problem you will more than likely not be able to fix it. If I get this fixed I will come back and fix the review of the game.

This is a nice addition to the game, but I must say this is a game/series that really has grown in too many different directions. It really doesn't seem to know what it wants to be or the complexity it wants for its rule set. With each new release there are new rules that don't get supported with future releases and deal with esoteric concepts rather than the basics of squad level combat. There is a strange mix of "keep it simple" with "oh yea, let's include that" decision making which frustrates me. This is a series that I feel like could have been great but due to strange rule additions and poorly conceived components will only rise to "It's okay" status.

This is an expansion of the Tide of Iron core game and it includes map boards designed to replicate city fighting or urban combat. The map boards incorporate roads that run along the edges of the board so that when laid out they create a network of streets. This is a good idea and it works until you get to the edge of a board that does not use another city map board next to it. Then you have half of a road along one side. This is easily corrected with map overlay pieces from your original Tide of Iron core game or some of the overlay pieces in the Stalingrad box. I bought this expansion hoping that the inclusion of the T34 tanks would give the allied forces a bit of a stronger hand in tank on tank warfare. Sadly the T34 is not much stronger than the Sherman in this game thus leaving the tank warfare advantage to the German forces. The pieces are reasonably well done and they look good. Combining this expansion with my core game is going to make for some really great gaming sessions. I think it was a terrible idea on the part of Fantasy Flight Games to drop this great game from their lineup. I hope they at least come out with a second edition or possibly even come out with a modern warfare version of a game like this.

Most impressed by the use of the buildings and factories as part of the game boards used. Will go well with the original Tide of iron and expansions to make full use of the expanse of the WW2 battlefields.

a different twist to TOI. Different house levels and sewer movement even. Fighting from level to level!

This completes the latest expansion to Tides of Iron. This one adds a lot and is of course the most horrific battle I can think of. My only complaint is the scenarios and campaigns provided. Not as deep and involved as I expected. A lot more could have been done, but in the end I can do that myself.

This expansion adds some new features to an already great game system. If you like Tide of Iron, I highly recommend this.