Unboxing Maxim Gorki

In June 1942, the Germans threw everything they had at Sevastopol. Dora, the 80cm railway gun, fired on the forts. So did Thor and Odin, the giant Karl mortars. North of the city, on a hill above the Belbek River, the 30th Coastal Battery kept firing back with four 305mm naval guns.

The Germans called it Maxim Gorki I. It took two weeks of shelling and some very determined pioneers to silence it. Even then, its crew kept fighting in the tunnels underneath.

That fight is the whole show in Critical Hit’s Maxim Gorki. It’s one hill, one battery, twelve scenarios and a rulebook for fighting underground. Let’s have a look.

Getting It

Critical Hit published Maxim Gorki in 2015 as an ASL Comp product, its label for ASL-compatible games. These days, Critical Hit only lists the Advanced Tobruk System (ATS) version of the module, at $99.95. Its store does carry ASL Comp Monster Map versions of the map.

If you want the ASL version, you’ll need to contact Critical Hit directly or go hunting on eBay. The link’s at the bottom of the article.

What’s in the Box

Contents:

• 4 map panels
• 12 scenarios, from small fights on the hill’s flanks to the monster Maxim Effort
• 4 counter sheets, 1,016 counters in all
• 12 pages of special rules
• The Maxim Gorki Display, a folding play aid

The counters cover German and Russian infantry and Russian naval infantry. You also get Goliaths and other remote-controlled demolition carriers, plus the gun turret counters with bent-barrel malfunction sides. Drum bombs, crater markers and pilot leaders round it out.

About seven pages of the rules cover terrain and the two sides. Roughly a third of the set is the underground combat system, and the rest lists vehicles and reinforcement groups. The display shows the tunnels, corridors, magazines and chambers under the battery. The box calls it a “special bonus,” but it’s not optional. You can’t play any scenario that goes underground without it.

The maps are glossy, more than I like. They’re cut to register at the edges, though, so the panels line up cleanly without the overlap mess on Critical Hit’s newer map panels. Hex size is standard ASL.

Die-cutting is typical Critical Hit, with big nubs at the corners, so keep an X-Acto knife handy. The colors run a bit off from the usual German blue and Russian brown. The fourth counter sheet prints noticeably paler. Your mileage may vary.

Big Guns, Wrong Direction

The Soviets just numbered their big coastal batteries. These were the 30th and the 35th. The Germans named them Maxim Gorki I and Maxim Gorki II, after the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky. Critical Hit uses the German spelling, which is why the box says Gorki. The module covers Maxim Gorki I, the 30th Battery. Despite the subtitle, it isn’t about the fight for the city itself.

Work on the battery started in 1912. World War I and then the Revolution stalled it, and it wasn’t finished until 1934. It had two armored turrets, each with a pair of 305mm guns, on a crescent-shaped hill above the Black Sea. Each barrel weighed around 50 tons and could reach roughly 42 km, about 26 miles.

The turrets sat behind 406mm of steel, set in four meters of concrete. Their armor factors are silly. In game terms, almost nothing but OBA or NOBA can touch them.

Here’s the irony. The guns were built to stop warships, and the threat came overland instead. In 1942 they spent the siege firing inland at the German 11th Army, which had come down through the Crimea. Their original job never came up.

Storming Sevastopol

Sevastopol had already beaten off one German assault, in December 1941. The second one, Operation Störfang, started with five days of shelling. Then on 7 June, Manstein’s 11th Army attacked. LIV Corps went after the forts north of the bay, the Romanians held the center, and XXX Corps hit the Sapun Heights from the southeast.

Here’s how it played out. On the map below, the letters match the chronology beside it. The dashed box is the module’s map, and the table right under the map lists its twelve scenarios.

The 132nd Infantry Division drew the 30th Battery. Its men fought their way down the Belbek valley and onto the hill, and on 17 June they took the surface. That’s when they found the second problem. Roughly 200 Soviet defenders had pulled back into the tunnels and rooms under the guns.

What followed was ugly. The Germans poured fuel down the ventilation shafts and set it alight. They lowered drum bombs through the wrecked turrets and blasted their way through the armored doors. Only a handful of the defenders are believed to have survived and been taken prisoner.

The rest of Sevastopol held out two more weeks. German assault boats crossed Severnaya Bay on 29 June, and the garrison started falling back toward Cape Khersones the next night. The 35th Battery, Maxim Gorki II, was the last fort to fall, on 4 July.

Terrain With Attitude

The module adds a pile of new terrain. On the surface map, roads hug steep hillsides, and concrete trenches double as antitank ditches. Blockhouses hold up to three squads. The perimeter wire counts as a barbed-wire fence rather than full Wire. Add crane debris and up to eight levels of elevation, from the valley floor to the top of the hill.

The crown jewel is the Bastion Observation Bunker (BOB) on the hilltop. It sees in every direction, with a +5 TEM against direct fire and +8 against indirect fire. A tunnel connects it to hex R20, near the battery complex. It even has a phone, so it can direct any kind of OBA the scenario gives you. Very civilized.

The gun turret counters track which barrel, left or right, still works. When a gun malfunctions, you roll on a Gun Turret Malfunction Table instead of just breaking it. Results run from barrel wear to turret jams, ammo shortages, power failures and losing all the ammunition. It’s a nice bit of chrome, and it keeps one of the module’s key weapons unpredictable.

Craters get their own rules too. The Germans brought the 600mm Karl mortars and the 800mm Dora gun to crack the battery. Mortar craters are deep enough for crest rules, so you can’t see in or out without exposing yourself on the lip. They aren’t ordinary Shellholes, and they get their own crater crest markers.

Into the Bunker

This is why most people will pick up the module. The bunker brings mechanics to ASL that I’d never seen before.

Once units enter the bunker complex, the whole scale shifts. The display stands for one hex on the surface map, about 40 meters across. That space is cut into roughly seven subhexes, so each underground hex is only about 20 feet across. Nearly every combat rule changes to match.

• Movement costs 1 MF per hex. Good Order Russians who start and end their phase in the complex get 2 extra MF, since they know the layout.
• Stacking is two MMC per hex.
• Small arms at two hexes or less is TPBF. Everything else out to normal range is point blank, and normal range is double the printed value. The corridors don’t allow long-range fire.
• Fire through a blast door, the red lines on the display, is halved.
• Close combat can start between adjacent hexes. Units in the same hex go straight to Hand-to-Hand.
• Instead of firing, a squad can throw grenades for 8 FP at up to 4 hexes, hitting only the target Location.
• A flamethrower fired down a corridor with a dead end within two hexes, or into a one-hex chamber, can blow back on the firer and any friends nearby.
• DCs can be thrown up to three hexes, a hefty 60-foot toss. In a tight space, you might catch yourself in the blast.
• Gasoline bombs and fuel get their own rules, after the German trick of lowering fuel drums through the wrecked turrets and lighting them.
• Blowing up an ammo magazine can send a blast wave down the tunnels.
• Blast doors seal the complex against the Germans until they’re breached, while the Russians move through freely. Units can also go up and down through the turret barbettes themselves.

That stacking limit seems high to me. A room might be 15 feet square, about the size of a home office, and the corridors are four or five feet wide at best. Cramming 25 or 30 men in there and still fighting seems unlikely. I’d have capped it at one MMC, but without more plays, I can’t say two doesn’t work.

The result is a game within a game. It rewards careful fire lanes, smart grenade throws and a planned way out. It punishes anyone who gets careless with a flamethrower or a DC in a closet.

The Scenarios

The twelve scenarios cover the June 1942 fight, from the first probes on the hill’s flanks to the last clearing action underground. The early ones are standard combined-arms fights for trenches, pillboxes and command posts on the slopes. Several use night rules. Many give both sides a reinforcement group purchase system, so the forces change from game to game.

Artillery shows up everywhere. Scenarios hand out German pregame bombardments, Soviet NOBA called from the BOB’s phone, 200mm OBA, Stukas and the siege monsters. Dora and the Karl mortars get their own OBA counters and firing rules.

Two scenarios stand out. Maxim Effort, MG9, is the module’s campaign game in all but name. It uses the full map for 16 turns, after 10 special German pregame turns of siege guns pounding the hill. The Germans score 10 VP for each turret they capture and 20 VP for the battery’s surface hexes. Depending on what the Russian player does, the Germans might win without ever going underground.

Into the Bowels of Hell, MG12, is the climax, and it’s what makes the module so unusual. It’s set on 20 June, after the surface fight is over. The last defenders of the 30th Battery are inside the bunker display, and the Germans have to dig them out. To win, they need to leave no Good Order Russians standing.

The whole scenario plays on the display, with nearly every bunker rule in action. It’s one of the most interesting things in the box… but if more scale detail makes you cringe, this one isn’t for you.

Vehicles

The vehicles lean hard toward demolition. Most of the AFV counters are remote-controlled demolition carriers, the Goliath and its cousins, with two-sided counters for the driven and radio-controlled modes. A plain truck makes an appearance too. That fits the battle. You’re not maneuvering tanks across open fields here. You’re trying to get explosives up against a fortress of concrete and steel. Subtle it isn’t.

Where to Buy

Critical Hit, but only the ATS version is listed.

Debriefing

Maxim Gorki fills an unusual niche among third-party ASL products. It’s not a broad combined-arms module with lots of terrain. It’s a siege built around one hill, two gun turrets, the BOB and the tunnels under them, and it goes all in on making that one fight as detailed as ASL allows.

You can feel the history. The guns, the craters, the siege monsters and the final fight underground are all here. Its bunker rules are new ground for ASL, with a new scale and nearly every fire modifier rewritten. It plays more like a dungeon crawl than a wargame. That interests me, but it might turn off the purists.

If you want to take ASL somewhere it rarely goes, down through blast doors and into corridors lit by flashlights and burning fuel, this is your module. Read the bunker rules twice before your first trip underground. And bring a flamethrower. Just watch where you aim it.

Academy Out!

GET TO THE CHOPPA…!!!

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