From: Jim Bailey Subject: A Review of SPI's "Global War" Review of SPI's "Global War" (circa 1975) by Jim Bailey This review is based on my memory of "Global War" which I played several years ago. I really wanted this to be a great game, but it wasn't. I guess it is the game's unfulfilled potential that keeps me from forgetting it. This review is an effort to exorcize that ghost. SPI's "Global War" is an attempt to depict all of World War II on a map of the entire world. While the concept sounds wonderful (and it is quite a kick to see the entire world laid out before you), the implementation of the idea failed. The scale of the game gives an idea of the scope of the trying to cover the entire globe in a manageable fashion. Using the entire globe as the game map creates some game-playing oddities. For example, Germany is only four hexes in size. While that is certainly accurate in terms of the relative size of Germany to the rest of the world, if you have played other WWII hex games, it's hard to shake the feeling that this seems silly. Further, by depicting the entire globe, most of the area of the game map is not used at all: neither side does anything in South America or in the majority of Africa, Russia and China. When you combine this with the fact that 75% of the world is ocean, only a small portion of the map gets any significant use. The flow of the game is truly bizarre. Although the player's notes state that at some point the Axis must carefully decide when to change its strategy from offense to defense to stave off the building Allied wave, the reality is that the Axis player must relentlessly stay on offense because any voluntary easing of pressure on the Allies dooms the Axis by allowing the Allies to convert from defense to offense. Also, because Germany starts out so strong on land, but has insufficient naval capacity to threaten Britain, the Allied strategy becomes an ahistorical "Japan first" strategy. The Allies can easily restrict Japan to its home island by cutting off supply to the Japanese forces abroad (US subs can easily destroy the small Japanese supply fleet). The Allies then begin bombing Japan's industrial capacity to nothing. While this rather simple handling of Japan is being accomplished, the Allies can build a very large ground force for the later invasion of Europe. Unfortunately for the Allies, the US entry is delayed until the first quarter of 1942 (unless the Japanese stupidly attack sooner). This means that Germany gets to mercilessly eviscerate Russia (easily done if played right). However, before the Germans turn to attack Russia, the Japanese are compelled to make a highly ahistorical attack on the Russians at Vladivostok on the first turn of the game. The Japanese must make this attack for several reasons. First, the Russians are free to attack the Japanese whenever they like. Second, reinforcements only enter at factory sites: Vladivostok is a factory site and therefore if the Russians are not kicked out of it, they can reinforce Vladivostok attack and take the Japanese-held city of Port Arthur which is not a factory site. The Japanese cannot thereafter produce sufficient land units in Manchuria to re-take both cities. Thus, Japan must attack Russia on the first turn because Russia itself must attack Japan on the first turn. The reason Vladivostok is so important is that Russia is eliminated falls when all of its cities are captured by the Axis. Since the Germans can take all of European Russia but cannot hack their way through to the sole remaining city of Vladivostok, the Japanese conquest of Vladivostok assures that Russia will be out of the war by the time the Axis attack the US. The Axis attack on the US is where things really get strange. The best way to explain how weird this all gets is to describe the fun romp I have had as the Axis player. Since the Germans get to move first, I took the lone German amphibious unit, loaded one strength point on it and sent it to invade the French Atlantic coast. I did this because the initial set-up leaves the French coast undefended and the presence of German troops in that hex prevents the French forces on the German border (which is a hex adjacent to the French Atlantic coast hex, ahem!) from retreating, and thereby eliminating the French forces. The rest of the German forces attacked across the French border, the French forces could not retreat and France fell in one turn. On the next turn Germany sent a couple of units to waltz through Spain to take Gibraltar while the rest headed east to begin pounding the Russians. With the Mediterranean sealed off, the Germans had no real difficulty in grabbing Suez by parading through Turkey. The rest of the German forces obliterated the European Russians in four or five turns. If the Japanese have taken Vladivostok at this point, then Russia is out for good. If the Japanese failed in their first-turn surprise attack, then the Germans cannot completely conquer Russia because the Russians can produce sufficient forces in Vladivostok to slow down the Germans' terrain-restricted attacks until the end of the game. The Russians will never be able to mount a counter-offensive, though. At this point I pulled a tactic which seems impossible to prevent by the Allied player. The Germans have lots of ground units but no amphibious units. HOWEVER, the Japanese have lots of amphibious units but few ground units. So... for the first attack by the Axis on the US I brought the Japanese navy to Gibraltar (through Suez!), loaded the Germans onto the Japanese amphibious transports and invaded the US east coast (which is at the maximum range for amphibious assaults) with German troops on Japanese landing craft. Since the US industrial might doesn't crank up until after it enters the war, taking most of the US factory sites is fairly easy. The Allies conceded the game after the Germans had gained control of everything in the US east of the Mississippi. The oddity here (aside from the bizarre Nippo-German invasion force) is that the Germans could not invade Britain with this tactic because amphibious assaults are not permitted if enemy surface ships are present in the invasion hex, and the Royal Navy is large enough to put a unit in every British coastal hex whereas the US navy cannot provide similar coverage for the US. (This is because the rules require most of the US fleet to sit in Pearl Harbor until the US enters the war.) The only truly interesting aspect of "Global War" is the production mechanism. In order to have certain units in the future, a player must put them into production in the current turn. Then, at a set number of turns in the future, those units are ready for deployment. Some units take longer to produce than others, and a nation must increase production of various units over time rather than suddenly decide to stop building 10 armored units and begin building 10 naval units. If Germany wants 10 naval units at some point in the future, they must start with the production of one unit and build on that production schedule in successive turns. Also, individual nations have different economic capacities. For example, Italy simply cannot build an atomic bomb even it puts its entire national production into that type of development. Unfortunately, this aspect of the game leads to its own peculiar possibilities. In the game I described above, the Germans were doing so well against Russia that I decided to devote virtually all German production to atomic bombs. The result was that by 1943 (had the game lasted that long) Germany would have had 3 atomic bombs to drop on Britain, thereby eliminating all of Britain's production capabilities. I suppose the final verdict on "Global War" is that it was a neat idea by SPI but one that was probably playtested only enough to get the mechanics down. I tried hard to fix the game myself but realized that most of my new rules defeated the point of the global scale and the possible alternative histories that made the game so intriguing as a concept. Indeed, most of what I would have changed about the game was side-stepped by another game produced years later: "Axis and Allies." So, if you want to see what ultimately became of the "Global War" idea, buy "Axis and Allies" which seems very much like what "Global War" wanted to be (although the folks at SPI undoubtedly had a much more serious game in mind than "Axis and Allies"). Ultimately, I would describe "Global War" as an intriguing experiment that failed.