Winter War, Winter Hammer and thoughts on appropriate rules

I have complained on a few occasions about the random movement in TooFatLardies games and the die roll for actions mechanics in DBX style games. It's not that I think that random movement is wrong or bad or that random activations are bad but in both cases the range of results can seem to wild. In Chain of Command vehicles can sometimes seem like they are driven by learner drivers, surging forward one turn, stalling out the next. In DBA Hannibal can have a brain wave one turn and forget to move both flanks on the next. The story of the battle in my mind hits the record player stopping sound effect and I feel irritated on these occasions.

With that in mind I want to talk about Winter Hammer. I played a Winter Hammer scenario at Ferret Con in Sheffield a few weeks back. This is a ruleset by Nordic Weasel for the Finnish - Soviet Winter War. I have not read the rules, only played Tom's excelent game set in a ~brigade level action south of Lake Lagoda in the intitial soviet offensive. Winter Hammer uses random die roll movement and random activation points. As a comrade in charge of the red army forces I rolled to see how many orders I could give and either deployed new companies of infantry or armour and tried to advance through heavy snow by rolling 2d6 and selecting the lowest.

My Fin opponents on the other hand rolled 2d6 and picked the highest. As such they were able to Skii around me and cook off my beutiful T26s.

It was a fantastic game built on a very simple ruleset. What struck me was that I really liked the random movement and commands that often really irritate me. In the Winter war, in bad weather, with a Soviet command system realing from the purges a chaotic performance feels right. The lesson here to me is not that a certain mechanic is necessarily always good or bad, but is it tuned to the history it is depicting? Should british line and native americans both roll 2d6 for a normal move across some grassland? Should Napleon roll 1d10 for his orders at Leipzig? Should the soviets get 1d6 orders in the Winter War?

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