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.

The Western Front in Spring, 1915

While I've been writing recently about the 1917 battle for Vimy Ridge (which I'll be looking at some more soon), I'd like to step backwards for a moment and look at the centennial time line.


The Spring of 1915 had seen action on most of the fronts in the war. From January onward, fighting was taking place in in France and Belgium, in East Prussia, Galicia, in Turkey (the Dardanelles, the Aegean islands, and the Caucasus), Mesopotamia, Persia, the Sinai, Arabia, West, South, and East Africa, even in Afghanistan and India (that portion that is today Pakistan).


Naval combat had taken place in the Atlantic, including the North Sea and the Channel, the Mediterranean, even in the Pacific, where a German ship was sunk off the coast of Chile. Although not a combatant, the United States had seen its first ship attacked by German submarines (the SS Gulflight in May); Sweden had the dubious distinction of being the first neutral country to lose a ship to U-boats (the SS Hanna, sunk without warning in March). American had even "captured" its first German vessels: the armed merchant raiders Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were interned in Newport News, Virginia, in March and April 1915.


Some of the war's new horror weapons had seen their first use in the Spring of 1915. Germans fighting in the Western Front's trenches in February had used flamethrowers for the first time. The first use of poison gas by the German and French armies took place in April. German airships made their first bombing raid on England in January.


And under a manmade hill in Flanders, hundred of British and Australian soldiers dug like moles, building a system of tunnels that would be packed with more than three tons of explosives. These explosives would be detonated in the first of innumerable mine attacks that took place across the Western Front of the rest of the war. Battles were not now restricted to the trenches or the skies above, but also took place in muddy tunnels far below the surface, as one group of diggers tried to outdo, foil, or eliminate their opponents.


This mine attack on the promontory known as Hill 60, near the Belgian city of Ypres, was a relatively small British action sandwiched in among a series of much larger offensives. In December of 1914, the French had begun an offensive in Champagne, seeking to take advantage of a rumoured move of German reserves to the Eastern Front. Two French armies attacked, made limited progress, and stalled as they fought off German counterattacks. Supporting attacks in Artois and in the Vosges Mountains had even less success, either at moving forward or at forcing Germany to halt redeployment of troops from the West to the East. The First Battle of Champagne ended in mid-March.


At about that time, the British made a highly successful but limited attack, trying to capture some high ground and cut German supply and communications lines. Although the two British and two Indian divisions involved burst through the German frontlines after a powerful bombardment, they were unable to communicate effectively with their supporting forces after battle had joined, and so the army was unable to exploit their success fully. German counterattacks again halted the Allied advance but left them in control of the town of Neuve Chappelle. The huge drain on ammunition supplies that the bombardment caused was Britain's first hint of the wholly unanticipated demand that modern warfare would make on  domestic industry's ability to produce artillery shells.




The Champagne offensive, the battle of Neuve Chapelle (March), and the attacks on Hill 60 (April) represented the Spring Allied initiatives on the Western Front. They were followed by a German offensive, which began the Second Battle of Ypres (April and May). This attack was the Germans' first to employ poison gas on the Western Front. At Gravenstafel, northeast of Ypres (and Hill 60), the Germans conducted a major gas attack on troops of two French divisions. The French forces, a Territorial division and a division of tough Algerian troops, broke in horror at the effect of the strange toxic cloud boiling over their lines. Apparently the Germans underestimated the effect the gas would have, as they had planned only a limited advance to exploit the hole made in French lines by this unexpected weapon.


Troops of the Canadian Expeditionary Force moved to hold the east side of the German breakthrough, and despite a second gas attack the following day, the German advance was brought to a halt, having driven in the northern flank of the Ypres Salient by as much as two miles. The Germans renewed their offensive in early May and again later in the month, using more poison gas, along with a heavy artillery bombardment, and further reduced the salient.


At the same time, the French and British were engaging in their last offensive for the Spring and Summer of 1915, an attempt to reduce a German salient in Artois that projected westward from Lens to just north of Arras and included our old friend, Vimy Ridge. The French planned a massive attack with six infantry corps, a cavalry corps, an infantry reserve of three divisions, and an artillery supporting force of nearly 300 heavy guns and over  1,000 field guns. The supporting British attacks featured three corps. German forces defending the region number slightly more than half the Allied strength, but they were heavily dug in, held the area in depth, and was well positioned on high ground in most areas.


The battle began in early May and lasted through late June. Fighting followed a familiar pattern: early French gains, following careful planning, new tactical training, and massive artillery bombardments, proved hard to keep building on. Communications and movement of reserves were slow and clumsy over heavily shelled ground, dogged German counterattacks and counterbombardments disrupted efforts to consolidate on captured positions and to push forward. Although many German reserves had been dispatched eastwards to shore up the front after disastrous Austrian losses, the Westheer still had more than enough troops and guns to blunt and in places reverse the French thrusts, especially since they were operating over less disrupted terrain.


Both sides learned different lessons. The French, always attached to the offensive, were heartened by their initial success--if the right preparations could be made, officers like Joffre and de Castelnau insisted, sudden breakthroughs could still be achieved. Others, like Foch and Petain, still believed in the offensive, but felt that operations in Artois had shown that more limited attacks, with limited objectives, gained ground more slowly but led to gains that could be held, rather that bold leaps forward that were just as quickly driven back.


The Germans, on the other hand, perceived that the Allies' preparatory bombardments caused significant disruption; they began looking for ways to make their defenses more resistant, both by digging them deeper and stronger and situating their main defensive belts in positions where they were not directly overlooked by Allied positions, so that they survived offensive preparations in better condition, making penetration and capture by attacking forces more difficult and more costly in causalities.

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.