Quick Looks: 1918 / 1919 Storm in the West

1918 / 1919 Storm in the West

Ted Racer is one of the elder statesmen of board war gaming and best known for rehabilitating WW1 as a gaming topic. In the early 90s the short lived Command Magazine by XTR Corp published three of his titles, two on 1914 and one on 1918.

And so it begins

Fast forward just under 20 years and GMT is in the market for republishing some older titles. In 2014 they republished the two 1914 titles in a dual pack and in 2020 they dressed up 1918 from a magazine game to a full boxed game and republished it. The dressing up here is updated graphics, a very clear rule book and the 1919 alt-history second scenario.

The system is very vanilla but very effective; igo-ugo, ratio CRT, fairly sticky ZOCs, reinforcement schedule. Unit scale is mostly corps, turns are two weeks, hexes 8 miles. Like many of Mark Simonitch's ‘4X WW2 titles the quality is in the execution and the tweaks to the system rather than core innovation.

Start of the breakout

The key tweak here is manpower. Both the central powers and the Allies were running short on population by 1918 (or 1919). Each turn both sides can reconstitute damaged or destroyed corps by spending their manpower, but once it’s gone, it’s gone. This gives both sides a pacing vs reserves problem to solve.

The players can free setup their forces for either scenario and have a range of victory point hexes to shoot for. It is therefore a fairly open game possibly suitable for tournament play or unorthodox strategies. The Germans have to swing first using their stross troopen to infiltrate and grab a set number of VPs before turn 9 or they lose the game. If the game runs longer than 9 turns the allies have to near clean the Germans off the map. The tide comes in and then it goes out.

Reims under siege

This ticks all the boxes player love; balanced situation, both sides can attack, simple rules but reasonable simulation, justifiable play time of 4-6 hours, lots of replay and decision making. On the weaknesses tally some turns can be rather quiet for one player or another, as in they do nothing that turn, and the reinforcement rules require units to walk onto the map edge, before getting on a train for strategic movement.

Obviously I recommend this one. Best WW1 game I have played.

Comments

Quick Looks: Cimean War Battles - Tchernaya River

A quick one today I traded off Across the Narva by Revolution Games (should post something on this) for an oldish (2000) copy of an S&T magazine. The mag came with two battles reprinted from the 1978 Quad game on the Crimean War. The full Quad also contained Inkerman and Balaklava, this magazine version just has Tchernaya River and Alma. Initial setup Early SPI games (and actually GDW and AH come to think of it) of the 70s tend to have lots of rules you already know. I go, U go, movement, fire, melee, rally, and most of the rules are standard. Command and control rules and friction of war arrived a lot later. To couter this I have added a simple house rule. For each division (units are brigates and regiments, about 2-8 per division) roll. On a 1 in 6 movement is halved unless the unit can charge, in which case it must charge the nearest enemy. A simple easy to apply rule for generating those light brigade charges. You could also easily convert this to a chit pull game by division

Quick Looks; Red Star / White Eagle

I generally hate it when people describe designs or ideas in games as dated, because many of the most innovative games are older than I am. Equally it implies there is something innately good about new designs, which I don't think there is. Dune is arguably the best multiplayer 'war' boardgame and the 70s basic DnD is in my view still the best RPG. I wasn't born until the late 80s and didn't discover these things to the mid 2000s so this isn't nostalgia doing my thinking, its just that some old ideas are better than new ones, despite our apparent 'progress'. Back when Roger B MacGowan did cool art house covers But having said all this Red Star / White Eagle is a dated game design. And this matters if you are looking at popping £70 on a new reprint of it from Compass Games. I am a wary cheapskate so I picked up a second hand copy with a trashed box of ebay for £20. It was worth it, but only just. Poles have just been creamed on the south we

Wilderness War is probably the best CDG (review)

One attribute of a good war game is that it opens up rather than narrows down the more you play it. Each time you play you see there is more strategic depth than you thought there was. When I first started playing Wilderness War, a card driven wargame design (CDG) on the French Indian War by Volko Runke, I thought it was simply a case of the British building a large kill stack and marching it up the Hudson and the French trying to get enough victory points (vps) from raiding to win before the inevitable. The outcome would likely be decided by card play and who got the reinforcement cards when they needed them. The game is afoot. Four games later I have realised that this is not the case. Yes the British will sometimes win by marching a big army up the Hudson and sieging out Montreal, but a lot of the time things will play out quite differently. Maybe the French strike first, perhaps the British realise that going up the Hudson is going to be a slog try another route. Ei

Lestrades_Game

Search This Blog