Ever since the form was birthed by Rob Daviau’s Risk Legacy, there’s been a central irony to legacy games — simply put, that their best parts are the things you do when you aren’t playing. Opening envelopes. Marking the board. Tearing up cards. Seeing how this physical artifact will transform before your eyes.

The same is true of Undaunted: Stalingrad, the fourth and most ambitious release in Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s much-celebrated Undaunted series, although to a thankfully lesser degree than in other exemplars of the form. This is a gentler legacy title, components-wise; nothing is destroyed over the course of its dozen-or-so session campaign, which can be safely reset upon its conclusion. More importantly, however, it sets itself apart by leaning into the physical terrors of war. By the conclusion of that fateful siege, both its titular city and the bodies of its combatants will have been ravaged by combat. This is a legacy game not only in the sense that it transforms between plays, but also in the way it forces one to confront the scars of war. It transforms, but is also transformative.

It’s Undaunted all right.

The city of Stalingrad was already under siege when the Luftwaffe began their bombardment in August of 1942. It was a strategic brass ring, the key to the Volga and the oil fields beyond, and both sides proceeded accordingly. As the Wehrmacht rolled into the suburbs, Red Army anti-air crews put up a desperate rearguard action, angling their cannons downward to trade ineffectual shots with the heavily armored panzers. When the initial defenses were overrun, the Germans were flabbergasted to discover that the Russian combatants were primarily women. The city had been evacuated only in part, stores of grain and cattle retreated to safety across the river. Its 400,000 civilians had been left behind and levied into the war, either organized into combat brigades or put to work constructing fortifications. Both sides rushed to reinforce the city. Over the next five months of bitter fighting, much of it would be razed to the ground. Casualties, both military and civilian, soared to well over a million.

François Truffaut famously noted that there was no such thing as an anti-war movie. The same is true of board games, although not for lack of trying. Undaunted: Stalingrad might be as close as an accessible wargame can get. As befits its starving setting, the city begins gray and only becomes more husklike as it weathers the conflict. Buildings are shelled until they deteriorate. The entire zone is portrayed as a single sprawling map, of which players only witness a sliver at any given moment. When a structure is destroyed, its tile is replaced by another that depicts rubble. Eventually, perhaps that rubble will be replaced by rubble of an even more deteriorated nature. One gets the sense that the city was once a living, healthy place. We see its arteries: roads, train tracks. We see its organs: grain elevators, neighborhoods. Now it is contaminated, a body on the slab that can only grow more riddled with corruption.

The best scenarios force tough decisions.

Still, Undaunted: Stalingrad is not an anti-war game. It is a wargame. A war game. It is preoccupied with war, fascinated by it, smitten with it. The system has largely gone unchanged from previous iterations, despite a few touch-ups. Like Normandy and North Africa before it, Benjamin and Thompson populate this world with discs that represent military squads. These are governed by a deck of cards, each one representing an abstract soldier. When you play a card, these soldiers prompt their corresponding squads to take action. Engineers spike a crucial passage with anti-personnel mines. Machine gunners hurl suppressing fire at enemy positions. Scouts dart into gunfire to mark the route for their fellows. Riflemen follow on their heels, ready to fling grenades and seize territory.

Every moment is heroic. This heroism is punctuated by little touches. The way cards appear from the deck is one example. Every turn is structured around a single hand, yours and your foe’s, which in aggregate set the terms for the current volley of gunfire. One card is offered up as sacrifice, determining your initiative rating for the round. Whichever side wagers the better card gets to go first, unleashing their cards and potentially inflicting casualties straight from their opponent’s hand. Like everything else in Undaunted, this is an exciting development, prone to little dramas and unexpected turnabouts. The same goes for the dice. Hitting an enemy squad is a process that’s one part ballistics — effective weapon ranges and ratings, matching anti-tank guns against tanks and anti-body guns against bodies — and one part the kinetics of rolling dice. Every moment in Undaunted: Stalingrad is built to maximize thrill and minimize downtime. It’s solid without being too dense, in the way wargames have often suffered from. The whole thing has been drilled so that it marches quite smartly.

It isn’t long before your squad becomes hardy veterans… and injured replacements.

I don’t mean to denigrate the work Benjamin and Thompson have clearly put into this game. Not at all. Rather, I suspect we lack, as story-telling creatures, the vocabulary with which to express the full range of horrors we can inflict upon one another. There is no anticipation in a game like Undaunted. There are no long nights in between skirmishes, when one can see the flames reflected in the corpse-drifted river, and starkly consider that you have been commanded to storm that very bridge in the morning. There are no moments of surprise when the bullet strikes flesh but we feel no pain for a singular clarifying moment that lets us see our future: the trench where the surgeon will saw through the bone, the decades of pitying glances for the war cripple, the sour yearning as you watch your hometown sweetheart accept a dance with the fellow whose connections got him out of the war. There is no gangrene in a wargame.

But there is an emotion that approaches appreciation, and Undaunted: Stalingrad invests all of its efforts there. If the city is the game’s ultimate protagonist, your squad comprises its supporting cast. And what a gut punch. The Undaunted series has always put human faces front and center, each card showing the moment’s hero — or its casualty. Where wargames have a long history of erecting barricades between players and the consequences of their play, here that barricade is… well, not thrown down, exactly, but punctured. Right from the game’s first moments, your squad is an assemblage of people. These are somewhat more uniform for the Germans — it was their whole thing, you know — but the Russians are shown as a coalition that has been brought here from places near and far. There are pale faces, brown faces, women’s faces. Eventually, decimated ranks might see fresh reinforcements from other quarters.

And in Undaunted: Stalingrad, the ramifications of battle are granted a stark depiction. As troops survive battle, they gradually learn their trade. Anxious greenhorns become confident veterans. These are given their own abilities: better attacks, better recon, the occasional hand grenade or sweeping suppression. The flipside is that casualties are also written into the game. Losses become haggard replacements. There’s one image that stands out to me, a rifleman who now carries a dented shovel in place of his sidearm. These images translate to gameplay disadvantages, such as troops who cannot move, or fire, or seize territory. On their own, these deficits would make the game unplayable. As members of a squad, they’re interruptions to the regular course of play, little challenges that must be surmounted, like an injured friend who must be helped along. In both cases, they’re as close as a wargame gets to communicating just how dire, how despairing, its battle has become.

Oh my.

Like all legacy games, these moments shift into focus in the downtime between the actual card-play and dice-rolling. In one sense, this could expand our definition of “play.” Perhaps we continue to play a game as long as it sticks in the mind, whether because we’re handling the accounting and breakdown that necessarily follows a match, or even because we’re still thinking about our frustration or elation over a key moment.

Undaunted: Stalingrad thrives in that latter space. The actual gameplay is — and I mean this despite my hesitation in saying so — almost ancillary to the story told around it. Awarding veterancy, tallying casualties, packing the war-torn tiles of Stalingrad back into the box; these are the game more than the actual game. The individual scenarios, for instance, are hit or miss. Some are straightforward or unbalanced (gasp), while others are complex logistical affairs that span multiple fronts and squads. It would be easy to bemoan such flops, but here they’re textures in a larger telling. One scenario asked my ragged Soviets to storm a fortified German position. After taking far too many hits mewling around the edges of the killing field between us, I made the decision to retreat. Could I have carried the day? Perhaps. But I wasn’t in a mood to add more replacements to my deck for what felt like a marginal gain in the grander battle for the city. As a moment-to-moment gameplay decision, this was a disappointment. As a consideration in the wider tale of a city under siege, it was perhaps the most satisfying beat in the entire story.

The best part of the game is found in the quiet in between missions.

That’s emblematic of the whole experience with Undaunted: Stalingrad. There are so many ways in which this is an imperfect or incomplete representation of one of modern warfare’s great horrors. But those imperfections and incompletions are also woven into its texture. Rather than trying to touch upon every single detail of the battle of Stalingrad, Benjamin and Thompson have instead settled on a focused retelling, one that puts a handful of characters and city blocks into a cataclysmic wider context.

The result still isn’t an anti-war game, but it is a wargame whose heart hitches despite its thrumming. This is a masterwork, one I would call the perfect capstone for the series if there weren’t a fifth installment already on my table. Still, it’s a wargame that I’m still playing, if only in those odd moments when I think back on the ways it touched me. That’s its legacy. Despite the thrills and imbalances, despite the dice, despite the utter incomprehensibility of its topic, what remains is the image of a rifleman armed only with a shovel, and a broken one at that.

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A complimentary copy was provided.