Many of you know I’ve been covering #DNL Deadly Northern Lights for quiet a bit of time now. One of the cool things about an engaging game is that it drives you to learn a little more, dig in just a little deeper and source more information about what ever it is you are playing.

This is why I like historical games vs say Little Pink Unicorns or Powergrid or some other Euro style game. For me these types of titles draw me in deeply. They expand and sometimes blow my mind! Nothing wrong with a Euro, it just does not scratch that itch fo rme.

Not just thematically either as a recent vlogger said because it looks prettier than an older game, but deeper, into the units, the men, the equipment, the structure, the way mechanic represent what is happening all of it in more recent releases of  note are doing a better job imparting more information more consistently and more easily than older titles.

This to me is where older games have started to fall down as we now have more data, more ‘historical facts’ better understanding of what happened [even despite rose colored revisionist history efforts ]. We can see through the newer titles how for instance in DNL that the Air Defense Systems worked, how relative values of certain types of equipment and or formations might fare against each other. What is involved in getting from A to B and still being an effective fighting force. 

Now that does not mean there could be revisions or better representations, even here with DNL I would suggest that color backgrounds against numerals would have added to the easy of play for instance.

So what does any of that have to do with DNL or orders of battle?

Well while I was busy playing parts of DNL wrong, I realized that the combined fighting strength of the Polish 7th Marines was pretty fricken awesome… well specifically against a Light Infantry reaction force of Brits, stuck in a Port in Denmark.
It got me to wondering what did a Warsaw Pact Marine Division look like? Well I could not find anything on the Poles, but could roughly assign the same level of equipment to them as say a Soviet Marine Division:

GAZ trucks of a wide variety, BMD’s, PT 76’s , ASU 85’s All sorts of groovy stuff. 

I guess thats just a little example of how new titles, with fresh Order of Battle resources, fresh mechanic ideas, and thoughtful design are making our wargaming hobby a richer better place to play.