Subject: A New Wargame! Amazing!
From: sparky@militia-watchdog.org (Mark Pitcavage)

People who attended last year's Origins and were promised that GRD's
new wargame on World War I was "imminent" may have lost hope by now,
but, only nine months or so late, it has finally arrived.  "March to
Victory," the first in a half-dozen or so planned games on the First
World War (expect it to be finished around 2010 at this rate), covers
the Western Front from 1914-1916.

Eight 11x17 maps (Why?  Don't ask me.  To save money, I guess).  3,640
counters (can you say "stacking problems"?).  A rulebook about a
hundred pages long.  Orders of Battle about double that.  Charts up
the wazoo.  Two cheap dice.  What more could you want?  If you have
$96, it's yours.

My first impressions:

1.  Box is one of the ugliest boxes I've seen in some time.  It is a
highly-magnified out of focus black and white picture of some
onrushing soldiers.  It makes you want to get contacts.  The
illustration on the back of the box was far better and should have
been used instead.  The quality of the box seems lower than past GRD
games.

2.  Counters look good.  I haven't punched them out yet (some GRD
games have had serious counter problems), but I'll be optimistic about
it.  GRD games historically have not improved on the GDW counters of
the 1970s and this is no exception.  I thought they might take this
opportunity (a new series of games) to be a little inventive, but they
were not.  Almost all of the counters are military units.  There are
very few markers (I sense this may be a problem, but I won't know
until I get into it).  As per any GRD game, the range and variety of
units presented are immense.  It certainly beats the depth of any
other operational World War I game I've played (not that there are
many).

3.  Orders of Battle.  The thickest books in the game.  Unlike earlier
GRD games, the Orders of Battle and the Rules are not staple bound but
merely stapled.  They are also three-ringed punched.  Presumably you
are supposed to detach the staple and stick everything in a binder.
It seems pretty cheap, but I assume this is another area of GRD
costcutting.  

The Orders of Battle look very detailed.  They are amazingly
ambitious, covering not only the participants from 1914 to 1916, but
neutrals (Switzerland, Holland, etc.).  And although counters are only
provided for some neutrals (like the above), the Orders of Battle seem
to cover virtually every country in the World--even South America.  Of
course the research put into this seems to have been far less than on
the European countries (one would hope so) and many of the OBs seem to
be nothing but guesses.  I am pretty darn familiar with Mexico's
military during this period, for instance, and not only does the OB
bear absolutely no resemblance to the Mexican military, but it seems
to ignore that Mexico was in a civil war at the time and there were
two entirely separate armies (not to mention semi-independent forces).
So a grain of salt, or even a shaker, must be taken there.  I am not
as familiar with the details of European World War I OBs, so I can
only hope that they are accurate.  As GRD designers tend to be Order
of Battle fanatics, I think they probably are.

4.  The Rules.  Amazingly, I like them better than I thought I would.
The game is, unfortunately, extraordinarily complex.  Some of the
complexity is warranted, but much of it is not.  The most egregious
error in this regard concerns the air system, which is essentially the
Europa air system (the most complex operational air system I know of),
retrofitted for World War I.  But air power simply was not as powerful
or as prevalent as to require such a detailed system.  Luckily there
is a (brutally) simplified system of air points that I suspect most
players will probably use.  A similar situation exists in regards to
the naval rules.  People may just use the simple rules because the
other rules are a) still extremely complicated and b) do not even give
naval fans the option of handling particular capital ships.

Another area of considerable complexity is the production system,
which keeps track of coal, iron, manpower and other elements in a
quarterly module.  This would be more justifiable were it actually
possible to produce very much with this system, but actually the end
results are not that significant. (this is my impression, remember,
not a statement from experience yet)

In other areas the complexity seems justified.  I like the attention
paid to railroads and railcap, offering some additions to the old
Europa system, and I like the more extensive differentiation of units
(already a Europa trademark), although I sense some of it may really
lengthen combats.  Engineers and artillery are especially given
prominence, and with good reason.

The major addition to the basic Europa framework is the addition of a
reaction phase between movement and combat (headquarters are added and
actually have something to do; leaders are also added, but they aren't
very exciting).  There are also two types of combat, the somewhat
misleadingly titled mobile combat and then positional combat.  Not
surprisingly, most of the combat on the Western front will end up
being the latter.  Expect lots of casualties.

Some of the casualties may come from stacks of units crumbling under
the weight.  Stacking is very liberal in this game (with advanced
overstacking rules in addition), which means that players must use
cumbersome "corps" counters, as in many Europa games.  Perhaps the
largest flaw in the maps (which really are wonderful) is that they
didn't go for a larger physical hex size.  You'd think that twenty
plus years of struggling with Europa's too-small hex size might have
turned on a lightbulb somewhere...

Turns are still two-week turns; this seems more reasonable for World
War I than World War II at this scale (Europa really needs three or
four turns per month in order to simulate some of the shorter
campaigns).  Many additions to combat help simulate the fact that
hexes rarely changed hands once stalemate set in.  Players, I think,
will be fighting many battles in which they simply feed units into the
grinder.  It will be interesting if they can do so more effectively
than their predecessors.  

Unfortunately, GRD seems to have taken a pretty conventional (perhaps
even antique) view of the changing tactics of World War I.  We really
won't know their opinions until the sequel (Over There, covering
1917-1918) comes out, but it seems like they have accepted blithely
the Germans=stosstruppen and Allies=tanks/planes version of World War
I developments.  I happen to think that Paddy Griffith makes some
rather telling points in his discussion of British tactics during
World War I, but I didn't see much reflection of that here.  However,
as I said, it may be too soon to tell.  But I think that by 1918 the
British were in general handling their troops at least as effectively
as the Germans and I hope the game will demonstrate that.  To me the
period 1917-18 is more interesting than the earlier period because of
the wild changes (from the end of Verdun to the rise and fall of
Nivelle to the development of effective British and later French
attacking tactics to, yes, even the strosstruppen).   

One of the really nice things about the game is that you get a real
sense of strategic scale, yet you have the opportunity to move units
operationally.  Thus unlike your standard strategic level wargame
where you might capture an entire country by moving one counter to one
hex, here you can get much more of the ebb and flo of warfare, and yet
see how it works out on a strategic scale.  It reminds me of how much
fun I had playing SPI's old _War Between the States_ which, flawed as
it was, gave me such a *feel* for conducting a war that I absolutely
adored it.  I can't say that this game will give me that feel, but
certain aspects about it look good, including more grand strategic
options than Europa games generally have.  

There are some straitjacket rules, and the most egregious one is an
attempt to simulate prewar French strategic and tactical doctrine
both.  Unfortunately it boils down to a ridiculous rule not even
allowing the French player to move units north of a particular hexrow
(as if the French would somehow ignore, for instance, ten infantry
divisions bearing down on Paris unopposed).  It reminds me of some of
the ridiculous rules in SPI's old _Four Battles of Army Group South_,
where Soviet Tank Corps simply had to aim in a particular direction
and go there, no matter what.  Another problem, aside from its
arbitraryness, is that it isn't very subtle.  The French strategic
plans (attacking in the South) are not differentiated from their
tactical doctrine (always attack!).  They are all treated the same and
they are treated as if they are inseparable.  (I think this is also
the place where an odd parenthetical comment is made, claiming that
half of all World War I casualties took place in 1914; I haven't
checked, but I feel this is almost certainly untrue)

There is not just a lot of chrome in the game, there is a tremendous
amount of it in the game, and some players may find keeping track of
it all pretty annoying.  Players will also have to keep track of
production points and things like "morale," a sliding scale of
hundreds of points which can be affected by virtually any battle.
Loss of morale can result in crises or collapse.  The rules here don't
seem very sophisticated (although better than in, say, Guns of
August), but they seem as if they might work.  It's more pen and
pencil work, though.

Well, that's probably enough for now--this went on longer than I had
intended it to.  I just wanted to give you my first impressions of
this game.  Those of us who are interested in the First World War
(possibly not too many of us) will definitely want to pick this up.
So, I presume, will Europa fans.  Others will have to judge their
interest and proclivities.

Dr. Mark Pitcavage, sparky@militia-watchdog.org
The Militia Watchdog: Http://www.militia-watchdog.org