Looking Back at 1915, Looking Forward to 1916.

1915 (a brief timeline)

Russian POWs in the Masurian Lakes Campaign (Great War Project)

I never finished my overview of events in 1915. Baldly put, the Western Front, despite the first mass use of poison gas, was a gruesome stalemate, but not the hecatomb it would become in 1916. Several campaigns were begun, sputtered, and went out; the Second Battle of Ypres was perhaps the most notable.

The Eastern Front saw more movement, with fighting in the Masurian Lakes of Prussia, and in Galicia and Poland proper. First the Russians suffered disaster, then the Austrians, then the Russians again, and the year ended with the Tsar taking over command of the war from the generals.

In the Mediterranean, 1915 saw the bloody and eventually pointless Allied invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula of Turkey. Italy, lured by promises of increased territory, betrayed its pre-war allies and declared war on Austria-Hungary, sparking the repeated and useless battles of the Isonzo. Allied forces also landed in Macedonia in October, opening up a mini-front that almost immediately fell into senescence as they failed to advance far from their base at Salonika.The British campaign in Mesopotamia, that had begun in late 1914, crawled slowly forward, with the British winning several victories that gave them cause to hope the region could be subdued in the next year.

Artist's representation of a zeppelin raid (Ian Castle's Zeppelins, Gothas and Giants)

The war expanded into new dimensions, as Germany's zeppelins began bombing raids on the United Kingdom. And Germany declared a blockade of the UK as well, seeking to enforce it with attacks by its fleet of u-boats.

Parts of my Great War-game collection that bear on events in 1915:

Western Front (Artois)
In Flanders Fields (Second Ypres)
Loos: The Big Push
Masuria: Winter Battle 1915
Galicia: the Forgotten Cauldron
Gorlice-Tarnow Breakthrough
Jassin 1915 (the East Africa Campaign)
Serbia the Defiant (a second year of fighting sees the Serbian Army driven from their country, if not defeated)
The Italian Front (First Isonzo)
A Fatal Attraction: The Gallipoli Campaign
Osmanli Harbi (the fighting in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Macedonia)
Zeppelin (the air war in Britain)

1916 (a brief timeline)

British troops in Dublin (Irish Republican History & Remembrance)

The following year saw the clouds of war darken even further, if possible, casting more and more of the world into gloom. Ireland, the United States, Mexico, and Arabia felt themselves dragged into the swirling maw of war, whether directly or indirectly as a result of the European conflict. Russia landed hammer blows on Turkey in the Caucasus and Austria-Hungary in Carpathia. Germany overran the Allies' new partner, Romania. Turkey, meanwhile, surrounded and defeated a large part of the British force in Mesopotamia.

And two of the most famous and sanguinary Western Front battles (in the large, world-war sense of "months-long conflicts over broad regions") took place: the battle of Verdun and the battle of the Somme.

I'm hoping to read through some large chunks of my Great War library, ones that deal with these last two battles in particular. And break out a few of the following titles.

The Big Push: The Battle of the Somme (ATO)

The Big Push: The Battle of the Somme
Over the Top! Verdun
Verdun: A Generation Lost
Western Front (Verdun)
The 1916 Brusilov Offensive
Over the Top (Brusilov offensive)
Romania: Transylvanian Gambit
Italian Front (the Strafexpedition)
Osmanli Harbi (the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and Suez)
Suez 1916: The Ottomans Strike
Pershing: The Hunt for Pancho Villa

Closing the Books on 1915: New Games, Part Four

Quick! I've got to finish off reporting on 2015 before 2016 gets any older! Last but not least in my tally of Great War games from last year, the operational scale games.

Let's start off with the games I can say the least about, because there's not much information or opinion on them out there yet. First in that category should be White Dog Games' The Russian Empire Strikes Back: Lodz 1914, since I can tell you only the barest details about it. It features an 11"x 17" map, 88 counters, and an eight-page rulebook, which includes provisions for solitaire play. Michael Kennedy designed the game, which appears to be very fast playing, featuring a swirling winter battle on the Great War's Eastern Front. It has one rating (a 9) on BGG.

Next up would be Fateful Days: Marne Campaign of 1914 is one of ATO/TPS's Pocket Battle Games, games whose map, counters, and rules are all printed in on a card the size of an old-fashioned postcard, making them the perfect promotional piece and an easy way for a designer to get an idea out in the marketplace. It's designed by the incredibly prolific Paul Rohrbaugh. I have a stack of the Pocket Battle Games, but I don't have this one, so I can't give a report on the rules of how it plays. Four people have rated it in BGG: two 7s, a 6, and a 5.

Third in this category is Decision Games' Lettow-Voerbeck: East Africa 1914-1918. This is one of Joseph Miranda's Mini Series games for Decision, 11"x17" maps with 40 counters and fairly simple rules. Seven BGG users have given this depiction of the fighting in East Africa a mean 6.69 rating. It's an area-movement game, with a card-driven dynamic (what DG refers to as the "Hand of Destiny" system). I have a number of DG's Great War games, but none from this Mini Series or that use their card dynamic.

1914: Germany at War comes from the teeming brain of Emanuele Santandrea, designer at Milan's VentoNuovo Games. It's his first Great War game; the second, 1914: Austria Hungary at War  is expected to hit the shelves in 2016. Santandrea and VentNuovo also published the highly popular bicentenary Waterloo 200 last year, but his bread and butter has been a series if World War Two games. VNG appears to be Italy's answer to Columbia Games, having published a slew of block games, starting with World War Two and now moving to the Great War; they have an inter-war period game, Time of Decisions, slated for 2017. Germany at War gets a 9.06 mean rating from 15 BGG scores. Judging from photos, it's a big, colourful game. I just skimmed some of the playtesting reports, but the fog of war resulting from the use of blocks combines with diceless combat based on strength differential (and some other considerations) to make this--I would guess, a rules-light but strategy-heavy game. I very much look forward to finding a chance to play either this or its Austro-Hungarian cousin. It's worth noting that Germany at War covers just the first four months of the campaign.

The latest entrant in Michael Resch's 1914 series is 1914: Serbien Muss Sterbien (SMS). In the latest installment (preceeded by 1914: Twilight in the East (TiE) and 1914: Offensive a Outrance (OaO)), Resch portrays the opening portion of Austria's invasion of Serbia in 1914. Resch's games are not simple: they provide a highly detailed look at operational warfare waged by the Great War's huge armies, and they demonstrate the extensive research and modeling that Resch undertakes. SMS deals with some fairly arcane and complicated terrain and armies, as reflected by the game's terrain rules and by the sections of special rules for Serbian, Montenegrin, and Austro-Hungarian forces. But the size and scope of the campaign still makes SMS (one 22" x 34" mapsheet and ~500 counters) more approachable than TiE or OaO(each with three or four map sheets and over 2,000 counters). In addition, this title casts some light on geography and combatants not familiar to most wargamers, even many devotees of the war that was spawned by the tensions between the Dual Monarchy and its Serbian neighbour. This game has garnered a mean BGG rating of 7.76 from 20 users.

The last title listed as published in 2015 is GMT Games' Gallipoli 1915: Churchill's Greatest Gamble. This is rather an outstanding fudge, as Gallipoli has not yet been published. However, the publishers have supplied a good deal of information about it (here's a link to the articles on Inside GMT that are tagged for Gallipoli), and it looks like it's going to be a doozy. This will be a huge (three-map, 1,000-counter) game, covering the initial landings on the Gallipoli peninsula and the first three days of fighting. As such, the stalemate of May, June, and July, and the follow-up landings in August at Sulva Bay are left to a later game/expansion. But avid Gallipoliphiles will still have their work cut out for them here. The replays and introductions to the rules provided on GMT's blog have been clear and easy to follow, but they involve quite a lot of detail. The rules appear easy to learn, but there's a lot of tactical detail to appreciate and learn how to effectively manipulate. I expect that players will want to play and replay this as their grasp of the rules develops into a grasp of the way to fight their units in the campaign. Nonetheless, the whole package looks terrifically appealing; I've pre-ordered it myself and can't wait to see it finally come out.

Gallipoli is, oddly, a campaign beloved by history buffs (wargamers included) and one that seems to cry out for the "what if" opportunities that games provide, but one that has been poorly covered. Paper Wars Games published a game on the topic (high level, low counter density) in 1979 called simply Gallipoli that has lived a somewhat obscure life (fewer than 50 BGGers own a copy and only 14 have rated it). And ATO's A Fatal Attraction has been a classic ATO title: a fascinating subject given a highly original graphic presentation and an innovative design (Paul Rohrbaugh again) but crippled by poor writing and development. Even one of its strongest proponents on BGG (David Hughes), who loves the game and has played it against its developer, states in his review that "game just cannot be played using the rules as written". The central part of the command and control rules that determine how and when players can activate units "are impenetrable, contradictory, over-concise, and have confused everyone I know who has played," according to Hughes. The victory conditions are also, apparently, a problem, as the Allied player can manage a win by refusing to land troops, bombarding some Ottoman forts, and, essentially, declaring victory and sailing home. Undoubtedly a better outcome for all involved than thew historical campaign,but hardly a depiction of what happened. One hopes that someday ATO will clean up the rules and make the game more playable.

Closing the Books on 1915: New Games, Part Three

So, continuing the round-up of 2015 WWI games, the strategic titles. I'll reiterate, these are more "what I can make out about the games from their press and BGG reception" not proper reviews.

1WW: The First World War: This appears to be a small game (11" x 17" map, 140 counters), published by One Small Step Games and published in the second issue of their magazine CounterFact, "journal of professional and commercial wargaming". I can't divine much about it beyond it's size (the map covers Europe from France to the Middle East; as an example of scale, the Franco-German frontier from the Channel to the Alps is five hexes), as there is one score (a 6) on BGG and no substantive comments (only four people are recorded as owning a copy). There's a short discussion on CSW Forum about it (a short discussion? on CSW-F? that says a lot), but so far it's mostly rules questions, very little discussion of the game as such.

The Lamps Are Going Out: Owned (apparently) by even fewer people so far (two, currently, on BGG), and rated a 5 by one user and a 10 by the other, this is another game I can offer little insight on. The title comes from a quote by Sir Edward Grey (British Foreign Minister in 1914 and a man I've always thought it would be fascinating to study, as he was active in British foreign policy for over 30 of Britain's most crucial years). It's a truly strategic area-movement game of low to moderate complexity. Its map covers roughly the same geography as that of 1WW with the addition of an inset map of East Africa; by comparison the Franco-German border is one French area meeting one German one, with another French eastern area bordering the Low Countries. The primary thrust of the game is resource allocation, so it does not surprise me to to read comments by the designer crediting James Dunnigan's World War 1 as an early inspiration to him. A playtest report suggests an interesting and challenging game with historical depth but still playable at a sitting. I'm certainly quite curious to see how this came out. CSW-F discussion ended in late November with the game still in playtest, and Compass Games' website shows it still in pre-order and suggests it is actually being shipped in January, so this is a bit of a fudge as "published in 2015".

Also from Compass Games (but listed as on their site as "released" and with over 140 BGG members owning a copy, it is clearly "published") is the much larger and more complex Balance of Powers. With a mean score of 8.82 over 28 ratings, this is clearly popular with those who have tried it. Balance of Powers covers the war in a much larger way, with maps representing Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa, but on a much finer scale in keeping with its focus on corps-level action. It's designed by John Gorkowski, whose stable of published and unpublished designs is fascinating and runs the gamut from 19th century Central Asian geopolitics to modern naval warfare, from the tactical to the strategic, with a considerable focus on topics related to the Great War. The game has come in for a bit of barracking about its colour scheme (hot pink features, among other shades), but reviews online suggest even those players have enjoyed its play.

No idea why I thought I was going to be able to cover all these games, even briefly, in one post. There will be a fourth and final post covering the operational titles, next time. After taking a look at VentoNuovo's 1914: Germany at War, I've moved it into that category. Despite the text on its BGG page (" game of World War I conflict simulation at the strategic level"), this is clearly an operational game, covering the first four months of combat on the Western Front.

Closing the Books on 1915: New Games, Part Two

Ah, well, I didn't get this post in under the wire. I'll finish up anyway. And, to clarify, of course these are just my own observations about what has been published. I can hardly *review* most of these games, as I've only played a few of them.

As I mentioned, thirteen entirely new games on World War I were published in 2015 (at least that I could find in Boardgame Geek). But, to avert ill-omen, let's make it up to fourteen by including GMT's 1914: Serbien Muss Sterbien, as that is essentially a new game using an existing system.

So, of these fourteen, four are strategic in scope (The Lamps Are Going Out, 1914: Germany at War; Balance of Power; 1WW: The First World War); five are operational (1914: Serbien Muss Sterbien; Lettow-Voerbeck: East Africa 1914-1918; The Russian Empire Strikes Back: Lodz 1914; Fateful Days: Marne Campaign of 1914; Gallipoli 1915: Churchill's Greatest Gamble); four are essentially tactical and almost Euro-ish (Wipers Salient, Les Poilus; Les taxis de la Marne; No Man's Land); and two are intriguingly hard to fit into other categories (I, Spy and Wings for the Baron). Here are some comments on the last two sections. Strategic and operational games comments coming in Part Three.

Tactical

Les Poilus has the distinction of being the only game among all of these that I've actually played myself. I saw it in the shops and was intrigued by its artwork and description and felt compelled to buy it. I'm glad I did.It's a cooperative card game for two to five players, who form a squad, mates from the same French village who join up together in 1914 and spend the game just trying to survive the war. Each turn, the squad has to go out on a mission and try to make it back intact. Completing the mission means success, but it isn't as essential as everyone getting back to their unit intact. Characters can be injured physically, but they can also suffer mental wounds that leave them less able to survive future missions. Occasional glimpses of good fortune tantalize the players, but this is a very hard game to win. If *any* of the players is seriously wounded or suffers enough shell shock that they have to be invalided out, the whole game is lost. Players come to depend on each other, and a blow to anyone hurts all of you.

One of the things that's interesting is that while the players represent French soldiers (the poilus of the title), the enemy is the war itself. No German soldiers appear. There are no hills to be captured, pillboxes to be blown up. Threats come from faceless shells, from cold and rain, from barbed wire and mud. Not only are you not fighting each other, you're not fighting anyone else. You're just fighting to survive. 

I played this game a couple of times with a mixture of folks, some of whom are accustomed to wargames and/or familiar with military history and the Great War, others of whom are Eurogame players or not familiar with the war or frequent boardgamers at all. What struck me was that everyone was gripped by the themes of the game, frustrated by its difficulty and compelled to try to bring this bunch of friends through without harm. I'm impressed by how well the designers, developers, and publishers did in creating a game that conveys its messages so well. I'd say this is probably the best new game, on any topic, that I played in 2015. I note it's rated a mean of 7.42 over 1176 scores, which I think is fair praise for it's innovative design and beautiful production values.

Note: The English-language edition was titled "The Grizzled", which seems rather unfortunate. It's an attempt to provide a literal translation of the original title, but it just doesn't carry the same power in English. I would have gone with "Dogfaces" or "Poor Bloody Infantry"--depending on whether an American or British/ANZAC/Canadian audience were intended--to try to get the same motive impact. French soldiers were called "the hairy [ones]" to reflect their tired, dirty, unshaven appearance, but it was a term of affection, and that has a resonance that simply translating the word from one language to another doesn't convey. Plus, English doesn't give adjectives the same leeway to hang out on their own that French does.

Wipers Salient looks in some ways to be similar in theme to Les Poilus. It's a solitaire card game where a player tries to accumulate the means to survive a stint in the trenches in the Ypres Salient. Cards represent support, hazards, missions, and (unlike Les Poilus) the enemy. In a sweet touch, all the artwork on the cards comes from Bruce Bairnsfeather cartoons (for American readers, perhaps the best characterization of BB is "the British Bill Maudlin"). Less than a dozen ratings. I'd like to give this a try.

Les taxis de la Marne is a cooperative game in which one to five players try to fill Paris taxis with mobilized
soldiers and get them to the front. While overall it's another process-management game, I like the idea of theming it to represent military traffic cops trying to get men to the Front to stop the German advance on the Marne. It has only ten ratings so far, but six of them are 7 or 8, so at least some people enjoy it. In contrast to some other games in this section, it seems lighthearted and fun, a counterpoint to the (historically appropriate) gloom of Les Poilus. Less than a dozen ratings.

No Man's Land: Trench Warfare 1914-1918 is the last of the tactical games in my list to comment on. It comes from Ludofolie. It has a small number of scores and even fewer comments. It's clearly an attempt to provide a low-level tactical game that can show the evolution of tactics throughout the war. It sounds as if it may have some difficulty in doing this, but with so little comment so far it's hard to say.

None of the Above

In this category are two unusual offerings. One is I, Spy, a game of pre-war espionage in which two to four players act as spymasters for different European powers. Each starts with the same resources, and each player's allegiance is hidden, only officially revealed at the end of the game, so it has aspects of Diplomacy and of the various "hidden villain" games. BGG players have rated it highly (a mean of 7.58 over 11 ratings), and the balance of text comments seem pretty favourable. I'm not likely to buy it right off, but if it shows up somewhere I can play it, I'll definitely give it a try.

Lastly, the ringer. I should have caught this in my prior post, but Wings for the Baron is actually a re-publication by Victory Point Games of a title originally published in 2007. Be that as it may, I find the concept intriguing, so I want to give it a mention any how. In this game, three to five players act as German aircraft manufacturers supplying the Luftstreitkräfte with new models of combat aircraft for the war. Players use research and design efforts, finances, and espionage to try to win contracts. That's an innovate idea for a game, and it doesn't surprise me to see VPG pick it up and run with it. This I would really like to try.