Pavlov’s House Review: First Tries at a Valiant Defense

This is adapted from the script of Episode 91: “Pavlov’s House Puts the ‘Fun’ in “You’re Fundamentally Screwed,” which you can listen to here.

This is the second time Sgt. Pavlov’s position has been targeted as he directs his squad and tries to stay alive on the north side of the House.

He’s scarcely spit the dust out of his mouth from the German mortar shell that hit the roof almost right over him before a sharpshooter, seeing him dazed and temporarily out of cover, sizzles the top hairs of his ushanka with a bullet.

To his left, Murzaev and Turdyev take down their third Panzer with their anti-tank rifle. To his right, Gridin is slumped over his now-silent mortar.

Pavlov’s House Solo Play Review: As goes the integrity of the walls, so goes the ability of the cats on the west side to do anything. They’re all suppressed by explosions.

This is my second, and geometrically more rewarding, tussle with Pavlov’s House from Dan Verssen Games, from the publisher’s popular Valiant Defense series — which includes Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms, Castle Itter: The Strangest Battle of WWII, Lanzerath Ridge and Guadalcanal: The Battle for Hendersen’s Field.

This series of designs offers history buffs and boardgamers with an appetite for accessible, middleweight game systems the chance to manage desperate pockets of WWII action against Axis powers that ended up meriting their own chapters in the era’s history, mythology and propaganda.

This is hard-pressed platoon-level action that forces you to think like a lieutenant — or a sergeant if the lieutenant’s already dead — whose unit is surrounded, whose ammo is low, and enjoy from the comfort of your chair weighing a string of critical decisions made in a world with a scant supply of second chances.

In the case of Pavlov’s House, designer David Thompson deposits you in the thick of it: The Battle of Stalingrad and the storming and subsequent defense of Pavlov’s House, a four-story apartment block where Sgt. Yakov Pavlov and Co. seized and held this do-or-die strongpoint in the center of the city, where key locations sometimes changed hands dozens of times in terrifying chains of assaults and counterassaults.

Thompson puts another historically grounded proposition in front of you: Since about 26 of Pavlov’s 30 men died in their initial sprint to the house and the ensuing welcome-to-the-neighborhood firefight, how do you keep it? The answer plays out across three horizontal sections of game board, which zoom you into three levels of building detail and pressure:

Regimental Command on the Volga

On the right, the board gives you a high view of the regimental command areas around the nearby Volga River, where you have to think like a general in a bunker and make tough decisions about how to support the boys in the house with Stuka dive bombers appearing regularly to disrupt your defense and staging areas: Do you ready some artillery? Get food and medicine on a boat across the river? String up comms lines that will give you more breathing room and help you more efficiently issue commands? Fix a cratered anti-aircraft site in time for the next appearance of the howling Junker 87s? You can’t do it all because the House is just one of many pots on the Russian command stove — and sometimes even when you do get the right adjutant to the right place with the correct order, a bomb swill swat your intentions off the board like a cat at play.

In my first game, my first-ever casualty was due to hunger because one of those Volga boats didn’t make it — a vivid connection point in play between your decisions in the right area and how it rolls down to the street-level bind those men across the river were in.

Plotting the German Squeeze on 9 January Square

Let’s pan to the middle part of the board; we’re looking at an aerial shot with the roof of Pavlov’s House, with its commanding views of 9 January Square, and the German armor and infantry that spawns on six tracks surrounding the House: Panzer 2s, 3s and 4s, Stugs, Scouts, Infantry, MG squads. This view lets you see where the Germans are pushing toward you, drawing cards from a deck of German actions that conjure not only the aforementioned units, but other lethal interference: bombings, shellings, snipings, all designed to wear you down and let the on-board units breach the house when the next Assault card comes up in the Wehrmacht Deck. If that happens, you’re done, there’s no final score to tally up.

Every so often, you’ll also have to pass a supply checkpoint. Not having comestibles in the house has immediate consequences, as I learned early.

The Action Inside the House

On the left board: An abstracted map of the apartment block itself, where you command Pavlov’s squad, represented vividly with counters, some of which even have period photos and names of the men who mounted the stand.

This is where you make a different set of decisions — informed by both your command-level panel on the right third of the board and what the Germans are up to in the middle — told in individual motion and lethality.

Using limited command abilities, you can hustle specialists around, get key dudes out of reserves and into play, shoot at encroaching German units, or forego move-and-shoot to set up suppression fire opportunities, refresh an exhausted comrade, or get heavier weapons and their required teams manned — a constant dilemma between the horizon of the near-term and the undeniable now, which both yell in either ear, with equal legitimacy. Everything is paramount.

The boys looking properly stern considering what’s coming down the pike.

I’ve played three times now at the basic setting, so here is the state of my sketchbook and impressions so far:

• For the most part, I found the rulebook a clear and useful conduit that connected the action on all three parts of the board. By my third play, I was still getting my clock cleaned, but running more and more of it on the reference cards without looking things up.

I’m thinking about some kind of formula here about decision space vs. roll-and-check deterministic elements and how they deliver story, and it all feels wonderfully balanced on the whole. There are a couple minor points I’m still having trouble with, but the curve was generally not steep. I used to have to take a break between turns; now I’m running several turns smoothly, with the exception of a few German deck questions that still keep bugging me. But on the whole, I feel I’ve picked a wargame with the right weight for me.

• I love how the rationing of actions and pressure to act ripple across the three sections of boards, the shit rolling downhill to the nervous systems of whoever’s still alive or able to man a gun inside the House. I’ve been experimenting with my opening moves inside the House itself and with command focus on the right half of the board, finding multiple paths to explore within those first few critical days of battle. Deciding when and if to bring in heavy weapons teams vs. high-stat individual shooters vs. bonus-granting leaders, overlaid with what you’re focusing on at the regimental level, is stimulating without being cumbersome.

• In my second game, I survived and the held the house, losing just two men, but scored dismally on points because I was too timid to stage counterassaults with the Storm Group options that come up right after the Resupply check. I’d built up my comms on the right board by sending my Russkies up telegraph poles, plus rushed my whole officer command team into the House, which also widened up the range of responses I had to depressurize the German advances on the street level.

I tried the same thing in the third game and simply got bombed off the map. On the right, my AA gunners just couldn’t seem to hit anything. The Stukas ripped everything apart, forcing me into a reactive state where I was nervously chasing them around with a dustpan, trying to ready sites that they doggedly hit and again; at one point, I had zero functioning staging, artillery or AA sites anywhere on the east side of the Volga, freeing the Luftwaffe up to blast my Sisyphean attempts to establish comms and threaten my regimental HQ.

At the House itself: German artillery dudes must have been given extra-good methamphetamine that day, because they dropped every size shell they had right where it needed to be, peeling back the squad’s fortifications like an onion, then pounding the soft flesh within into an almost constant state of suppression that meant they could do little except shiver behind piles of brick and get the occasional rifle shot off.

But this was fine. It was better than fine, because the story welled up out of the bedrock of the game easier and easier each time, the game’s charms distilling out bright and clean.

This Game is Earning its Laurels and I’m Going to Play the Shit Out of It

Three years ago I would have told you that Warhammer 40,000: Conquest the Card Game was my unimpeachable #1 of all time, but in my late mostly-solo career, I’d have to tell you that Thunderbolt Apache Leader has taken that spot. I can scarcely imagine what would dislodge it, but I will say that Pavlov’s House is delivering everything I wanted to get out of it and is going to be seeing heavy play this year.

Thunderbolt Apache Leader passed — or failed, depending on how you look at it — The Hygiene Test. When I was on Day 2 of a mission, this game was so engrossing that I did not want to bathe or eat. Nothing I’ve played, wargames or otherwise, in the past five years was so engrossing.

But Pavlov’s House earns a different, but laudable, medal: War Before Breakfast. By Game 2, I’m waking up and walking right to the table to play out the rest of a game. Before anything else except coffee. It also wins the Resident Guest award: I’m currently not putting it away in between games because I know I’m going to be setting it up again within the next 12 hours.

That’s a winner. That’s something that will see heavy play for the next few months. That’s your money’s worth.

There’s only one bittersweet note: The knowledge that this game has been out for seven years and I’m just now getting to it. Scroll to any memory: looking for bullshit at Lowe’s on some Saturday, eating a so-so meal with people who don’t say anything interesting, binging some series whose name I can’t even remember…I could have been defending the House this whole time.

Within the game and without, the tragedy of misallocation will always haunt you.