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.