In the year of the 70th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, Sergei Zdorovtsev, an inventor from Kursk, recollects how he created a tabletop game based on one of the crucial battles of WWII – the Battle of Kursk.
Passionate Personality
Zdorovtsev has been a very enthusiastic person by nature. He graduated from Odessa Nautical School and then worked as a mechanic in the port of Novorossiysk. After graduating from Geography Faculty of Kursk Teacher College he worked as a departmental assistant. While honing his kayaking skills, he paddled along the Seym and Desna Rivers from Kursk to Chernihiv in Ukraine in three weeks, thus having covered 650 kilometres. He used to publish a magazine in Arkhangelsk, was head over heels in an education job – he headed a study group in Kursk Children and Youth Tourist Centre.
Today Sergei takes up archery, photography and continues to invent just like many years ago. He developed over 500 intellectual and entertaining games, 26 out which have been released by well-known publishers and distributed all over the country. The Battle of Kursk, a war strategy, is his special project. 5,000 copies of the game were sold.
He has been interested in the war history since youth. "My grandfather was a tank man, a participant of the Battle of Kursk. He was reluctant to talk about the war," Zdorovtsov says. "However, our home library contained a lot of historical literature, war memoirs, reference books on tactics and branches of armed forces. Therefore, when in 1978 at a school-leaving exam I got a question about the Prokhorovka tank battle, the answer was an easy ride for me."
Table Game for Patriotic Education
Many years after, Sergei simulated his own Battle of Kursk. "An idea to make such a game dawned on me when I saw a bas-relief that depicted this battle on the wall of Kursk railway station. In order to reproduce maximum historical accuracy I studied many books and archives. I appreciate the help of our local study museum's personnel and Alexei Makarskiy, a local historian. It was rather easy to replicate the arrangements of German units as it was described in detail. As for the Soviet armed forces, different sources could indicate two different positions for the same division or even referred to it as the reserve."
It took him half a year to develop the game. Now Sergei dreams of organizing a patriotic club in Kursk for schoolchildren and students where they would be able to develop their tactical and strategic way of thinking. And the main purpose is to offer a better alternative to on-line games and internet communication.
Settlements, rivers, forests and hills designated on the game board accurately copy the real topography of the Fire Bulge. Military formations, eventually making up an army, are placed along the front line: all forces that participated in the summer of 1943 are available for players. It only remains to foresee the actions of the enemy keeping in mind unexpected air strikes, scouting operations and invisible movement of reserves of the counterpart. Each move may take up to 40 minutes because the price is extremely high – victory or loss not only in the battle, but in the whole war. Where would the history go if a token were placed in a different point of the grid?
