Great War art: the Imperial War Museum

Just as a quick second post for this evening, I wanted to highlight a page on the Imperial War Museum's site, a collection of a dozen paintings of front-line life during the Great War.

Since it's not immediately obvious (or wasn't, at least, to me), what are shown are details--if you click on the image of the painting, a pop-up window will show the entire work.

The Marne: Two boardgame depictions

As promised, I'm starting a look at the First Battle of the Marne through the eyes of a couple of different boardgames.

This entry contrasts two different treatments by the same designer. As I mentioned, I recently received the new editions of Ted Racier's two early war operational games, Glory's End and When Eagles Fight. A few brief words on opening that treasure trove follow.

First, the box cover: handsome cover art, a painting entitled France! 1914 by the French war artist Leon Reni-Mel. It's quite evocative, in its depiction of a young poilu in the famous pantalons rouges at the moment of his death, rushing forward in the spirit of French Army's "attack, attack, always attack" doctrine.

The back of the box provides a look at the two major maps it contains, one of the western front (including Belgium, Luxembourg, and bits of France, Germany, and the Netherlands) and one of the eastern front (featuring pieces of Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, and Romania). We get a sample of game pieces, a list of contents, and details on game scale. The design, development, and production crew are credited. And the box provides the publisher's assessment of the game's complexity (low-medium) and solitaire suitability (high--luckily for me!)

Inside the box we find the usual high-quality components one expects from GMT Games: rulebooks for both games, two sets of player charts for each games, three and a half sheets of counters (plus the ubiquitous GMT bundle of ziplock bags for counter storage), a mini-map for playing a short scenario of Glory's End, and the main map sheet itself. In a practical move, GMT has printed one sheet, double-sided, for the two games, with western Europe on one side and eastern Europe on the other.

Since my goal was to post a piece on the Marne battle, I was delighted to find the small map with the short, introductory scenario specifically focused on the Marne. I was particularly amused, too, since I had set up the intro scenario from Clash of Giants, which focuses on the exact same moment. Nothing would make it easier to compare the two games that to take a look at the starter's scenario for these two Ted Racier games of the early war on the western front.

Here is a look at the Clash map, set for "The Allied Counterattack" scenario, which begins as the French and British are about to spring their trap on the advancing Germans. I've provided only a small image, but to the west (left) side of the map, if you squint you can probably see the grey blob that is Paris, wedged in the loops of the Seine River. Around and to the north of it are the troops of the Fortified Camp of Paris, and in a north-south line to the northeast of the city is the advancing French Sixth Army. A few scattered blocks of grey represent the flank guards of the German First Army, most of whose combat troops are committed in the bulge east and south of Paris. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), a few lonely stacks of khaki counters, screens the gap between the city of Paris and the French Fifth Army under it's newly appointed General Louis Franchet d'Espère. The Fifth faces not only von Kluck's seemingly triumphant German First Army but also von Bulow's Second Army, trying to widen the east side of the German penetration. To von Bulow's east is von Hausen's Third Army, Saxons all, and the screen formed by the scattered Fourth Army, the link to the (unseen Firth Army, battering the walls of Verdun and the Sixth and Seventh, deep in the hills and mountains of the Vosges.

East of the French Fifth Army is the high shoulder formed by the clustered French Ninth Army of the inimitable Ferdinand Foch, future commander in chief. And to their east, facing the German Fourth Army, is France's own Fourth Army, likewise spread thin to maintain contact with forces to the east. The date is the 5th of September, and the solid mass of Michel-Joseph Manoury's Sixth (French) Army is about to give Friedrich Sixt von Arnim's IV Corps a horrid surprise.

Contrast that setup with the same scenario, more or less, in Glory's End, set up on the mini-map provided with that game (it's the same scale and size of hex as the main Glory's End map, but easier to set up in a small space). One thing you'll notice right away is that the map covering the same area is much smaller, the counter density higher, while at the same time the overall number of counters is much lower. That's because Glory's End packs the entire western front into its main map. Each hex is 9.5 miles wide, instead of the 3.3 miles of the Clash of Giants: Marne map. Most of the units in Glory's End are corps or corps-sized formations, while CoG:M units are most of them divisions. (Those three hexes covered with ignominious "Out of Command" markers contain the regrouping forces of the BEF.)

So, that's a quick look at the new title, and a swift visual comparison with another treatment of the same action by the same designer. I have a number of other titles that cover operations on the western front in 1914 (The Great War in Europe and Grand Illusion, both also by Ted Racier, and Michael Resch's 1914: Offensive a Outrance), but none of them specifically call out the First Battle of the Marne for scenario treatment. There are half a dozen games that specifically focus on the First Marne, but none of them are in my library, alas.

Next time: that promised letter. And, soon, hopefully, an account of playing through one of these Marne scenarios.

preview of coming attractions: the Battle of the Marne

I decided that a walkthrough of playing of the Clash of Giants: Tannenberg game, even solo (with all the deficiencies in competitive thinking that that entails) would probably create an undue influence on developments in the triple-blind running of the game that's underway (we're partway through Turn 2). So I thought that instead I'd embark on the other title in the first CoG pairing, the battle of the Marne.

This idea was reinforced by the timely arrival of Ted Racier's latest effort, a reboot of his early war operational games, 1914: Glory's End/When Eagles Fight, just published by GMT Games. The western front portion of this package features a short introductory scenario, also featuring the Marne battle. Between this, CoG: The Marne, and possibly a look at (though not a full playing of) relevant portions of GMT's other 1914 west front offerings, 1914: Offensive à outrance and Grand Illusion: the 1914 Campaign in the West, we should be replete with lovely maps and examinations of the opening portion of the war, which everyone thought would go so quickly and which instead lasted a very long time.

The First Battle of the Marne was, of course, not the beginning of the war on the western front. That had been what was called the Battle of the Frontiers, where both the French and German armies began plunging swiftly into the breakneck operational advances that their pre-war planning had assumed would be the key to success. The French, underestimating German numbers and resolve, had committed on a tremendously wide front and were driven back bloodily. The Germans, partly due to superior numbers and more effective concentration, had succeeded in their offensive moves.

And because the British and French armies had not engaged in as much pre-war communication, planning, and liaison as they ought to have done, the Germans had also found an opportunity to drive a wedge between the British Expeditionary Force and the French Fifth Army, creating a gap they were at pains to exploit. French and British forces scrambled backwards in the Great Retreat, an exhausting pell-mell attempt to redefine defensible positions somewhere short of the outskirts of Paris.

In the battle of the Marne, French (and allied) commander in chief Joseph Joffre used the success of the German armies against them. Rushing forward to capture their operational and strategic goal, the French capital, the German First Army had become dangerously separated from the rest of the German front line. By pulling together a scratch force, the Sixth Army, Joffre enabled the Franco-British forces to attack the Germans' most successful force in detail, driving it backwards and halting the enemy advance. One of the best-loved, if historically uncertain, elements of the battle's narrative was the delivery of several battalions of the attacking French Sixth Army at a crucial point in the engagement, but a fleet consisting of all the commercial taxis and buses of the city of Paris, pressed into service to rush 6,000 men fifty kilometers to forestall a German advance.

I'm hoping to post a quick "unboxing" preview of Glory's End this weekend (I'll confess, dear readers, I didn't wait to unbox it...). If I have time to walk through an attempt at playing its Marne scenario, as well as one of CoG: The Marne, I will, but that may have to wait until next week.

I hope to have time to post another of my grandfather's letters this weekend. We'll see how overly ambitious I'm being.

Tannenberg--lumbering closer

The Labor Day holiday weekend didn't give me the time I hoped it would to prepare for this campaign on paper, as a friend of my partner's was visiting us, and my game table is in the basement, which also serves as our guest room.

Nonetheless, I'm plowing forward (slowly) with preparations for our triple-blind simulation of this opening East Front campaign. I took a look at the rules for The Cossacks Are Coming and its successor, 1914: Twilight in the East, and decided to go with a simpler option, Clash of Giants: Tannenberg. While I can simplify a great deal of the information management for the players, they need to be able to grasp the mechanics even if they don't see them all, and the mechanics of the other games are complex and will slow things down too much. So my next step is to put together a precis of information (basic parameters of the game system, how the refereed version will work, starting order of battle and positions) and share it with the players.

In the meantime, I've found a nice image of the starting positions on the map at Boardgamegeek; I hope the poster, Kevin Moody, doesn't mind my using it as an illustration here.

You can see the full-size image on BGG if you log in there (membership required, but free).

The map depicts East Prussia and some adjoining sections of Russia (including Poland, at the time a part of the Russian Empire). If you look closely, you can see the thin broken brown line that represents the border. In the northwest corner of the map is the Gulf of Danzig, a southerly projection of the Baltic Sea. Also visible is the Frisches Haff, now called the Vistula Lagoon, the large inland sea that lies between Danzig (to its west) and Konigsberg (at its eastern end). Spreading southeast from the Haff is an area of forests, hills, and other rough terrain, in the center of which are the Masurian Lakes. These are over two thousand large and small bodies of water, formed when retreating glaciers deposited piles of debris that blocked rivers and streams and many of them later linked by canals to provide transit across this dense terrain. Further south and east is a large body of marshland. This rather forbidding region is the area that lies, roughly, between the advancing Russian First and Second Armies.

The Second Army starts with much of its force on the board, along the south edge. Most of the First Army is just about to arrive--it's stacked on two entry points on the east edge of the map. 

One part of German forces begin scattered in a defensive screen, some distance back from the southeren border, many of them in fortified positions or guarding railway junctions. Guarding them to preserve them for German use, rather than protecting them from Russian capture--Russian railways used a different gauge to German ones and were useless, for the most part, to Russian forces during the campaign. (This makes that thin broken brown border line we looked at earlier rather important.)

The main field force of the German Army in East Prussia lies in and around the town of Gumbinen, near the northeastern border and directly in the path of the slowly arriving Russian First Army.

Another part of German forces is guarding the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg and its extensive defensive network. They include troops standing along one of the main German rail lines (more important for supply than movement), which runs from the border to Konigsberg and then southwest to Marienburg. Another line runs roughly parallel through the center of the province, and a third runs more or less through the lake district. These, too, connect eventually at Marienburg and lead west to Berlin, though there is also a line through the fortress of Thorn to the southwest towards Silesia.

I mention the rail lines not only because the Germans will rely on them for supply, but because the Russian objectives lie most of them along the northern and central lines (as well as at the Frisches ports of Konigsberg and Elbing and the university town of Braunsberg).

The iron cross counters show victory locations that start under German control. The Germans will gain victory points for these if they hold them at the end of the game. Small red dots forther north and west are locations for which the Russians will get points (IIRC, some locations covered by German troops at deployment are also Russian VP hexes).

The game's sequence of play is fairly simple. Both sides check to see which, if any of their forces are out of supply. Then the Russian player places any arriving reinforcements or replacements, moves first one army, then the other, and resolves any combats. The the German player brings in reinforcements and replacements, moves his troops, and conducts combats.

One unusual mechanic exists in this Clash of Giants series. Both sides roll for the movement points of their armies; all units in an army (or, in the case of the Germans, their Eighth Army and the separate I Corps) receive the same amount of movement (exception: cavalry always receive a fixed amount), but it can vary from turn to turn from as few as one movement point (essentially slwoign the army to a crawl) to as many as six.

Another twist to this mechanic in the Tanneberg game is that, starting on Turn 4, the German player--before moving his troops--nominates which Russian army will move first in the next turn and watches the Russian player roll for movement points. Thus the Germans know while they execute their move which of the Russians will move next and how far. (On Turn 1, only the Russian First Army moves--the Second Army is still assembling itself in this period.) This advantage tot the German player is the designer's simple way of reflecting the superior intelligence the Germans got during the campaign when the Russians, outrunning their hard-wired telegraph network and short of trained radio cryptogrpahers, were forced to transmit most of their military communications between armies by wireless with no encoding. German radio operators simply listened in and copied down the orders being transmitted.

I'm going to brief the players now and, with any luck, we should have the first move underway soon!