Final Combat: Little Stalingrad

The next my occasional series on scenario books from Britton Publishers is their latest offering - Little Stalingrad.  This book contains 37 scenarios based around the Canadians at the Battle of Ortona, Italy in 1943.

The booklet comes in at 116 pages and the pdf is just over £9.  As with some of the other books this one has some very brief publisher's notes and a table to help you translate the stats from Final Combat to Arc of Fire, Battleground, Disposable Heroes, Face of Battle and Nuts!  This is followed by around 9 pages of historical material on the battle and the opposing forces which provides the background for the scenarios.

The scenarios are broken down into 10 separate sections and, in my view fall into three broad categories - firstly there are tiny scenarios, often only in a single building with a couple of troops, then there are the moderate sized infantry scenarios and finally there are the large scenarios which require multiple Shermans etc.  (roughly 7/20/10).  Each scenario starts with a brief introduction, the specific setting, an order of battle for each side, the victory conditions and the historical aftermath. The final section of the book has the maps for each scenario - this time they have been created using some software called Campaign Cartographer and are functional and each is accompanied by some brief GM notes.  Since the scenarios cover the urban fighting most of them require buildings of varying sizes, some ruined.

This is a battle I knew little about and so have found reading the booklet rather interesting and the variety of sizes of scenario means that if you have some buildings suitable for Italy and some suitable figures (both of which I have access to) there should be something here for you.