Lestrades_Game

  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 ...

Sometimes I have got to wargame! So I picked up a few titles recently including this magazine game from Vae Victis, a French language  periodical  that comes with a game. English rules translations can be downloaded from their website. It's good, within the expectations of what you get from a magazine game. 1914 depicts the east front of WW1 at Corps scale with two week turns in a small half mapper footprint and 16 pages of A5 rules. Like most magazine games it is fairly simple and most mechanisms are recognisable to hex and counter veterans. The rules translation and clarity is good enough to discern the designer's intent without quite being tight enough to eradicate all doubts and queries.  Each turn the central powers (Germany & Austria) and Russia will roll off to see who gets initiative (which can be very important and is entirely random). The  acting player will then chose a front to activate, the northern German front or southern Austrian and then they mov...