The Great War in the Near East review

The issue game in Command Magazine No. 37, The Great War in the Near East, is an add-on module for The Great War in Europe, which appeared in Command No. 33. It’s also playable as a standalone game. Like the parent game, the core standard wargame supply, movement and combat rules take up only five pages of the 20-page rule book. The balance of the rules describe the special rules needed to account for the special conditions of the Great War’s secondary fronts in the Caucasus, Palestine and Iraq.

Also like the parent game, the draw of chits provides the main engine for the game’s events. Unlike the earlier game, however, where players had some input into the pace of chit events because they paid resource points for them, in this game chit draws are automatic. Resource Points are so rare that players would never spend them on chits.

The map is compatible with the Great War in Europe. The Caucasus and Iraq maps are considered “East” maps and use the same 20-22.5-mile hexes as the parent Game’s Eastern Front. Palestine, on the other hand, is a “West” map, and uses the 9.5-mile hexes and double movement allowances of the French and Italian fronts in TGWIE. Unlike the parent game, where most units were divisions, this game also has many brigades and even some battalion- and company-sized units.

Fittingly for a secondary front, events in this game are driven in large measure by factors outside the player’s control. On each front, both players try to make do with minimal resources in supply and troops and make some headway. The game system ensures that the game follows history closely, and it is not easy to make dramatic departures from the historical script. Each front has only the most tenuous connection to the others. Even the Ottomans, who are the common belligerent on all three fronts, will find it hard to redeploy forces to take advantage of his interior lines.

The Allied objective is the force the surrender of Turkey by capturing “surrender towns.” During victory check turns the allies add the number of captured towns to a die roll, if it is 11 or more, the Allies win. The Central Powers win by avoiding a loss, except if the Army of Islam chit is drawn, in which case they must also capture the Russian city of Baku.

The Central Powers can optionally take six German shocktroop divisions in 1918. If they succumb to that temptation, they have to capture three Allied Victory hexes to win.

As a standalone game it takes about 20 minutes to set up and can be played in a long sitting. While there are potentially more than 50 turns, many will go by with little or no activity.

When combined with the parent game there is not too much of an addition in playing time for the same reason, although the combined game will certainly work best for team play, if for no other reason than coping with the mental adjustments needed to play, essentially, SIX simultaneous wargames!

There’s some minor overlap in the orders of battle, the duplicate units are marked with an “X” and set aside. The chit pool is also adjusted. There are some chits from each component game that are not used and several new ones specifically for the combined game that are added. Units from TGWINE are identified with a diagonal slash. Units used only in the combined game have the slash in red.

Recommendations

(Yes) For Wargamers: Primarily if one has The Great War in Europe. As a standalone game TGWINE is probably only for players with a special interest in one of the component campaigns.

(No) For Collectors: Nothing remarkable.

(No) For Euro gamers: No, no, no.

Great War in Europe review

A lot of ideas that appear in Ted Raicer's popular Paths of Glory make an appearance here, with the game's chit random event system. Perhaps the most monstrous of the "mini-monsters" published in Command Magazine, The Great War in Europe, from issue No. 33, covers the major fronts of World War I on the divisional scale. Most turns are one or two months, except for August and September, 1914, where each turn is just two weeks. Each hex on the western and Italian fronts represents 9.5 miles, every hex on the Russian front is 22.5 miles. The different ground scales are handled by doubling every unit's movement allowance on the western front (so a 2-4 French infantry division is really a 2-8.).

Units are the standard attack-defense-movement factor layout. Where the attack and defense factors are the same -- as in the aforementioned French division -- a single combat factor is listed.

The core of the system (supply, movement and combat) only take up five pages of the 22-page rule book. Most of the rest is devoted to all the myriad of special rules needed for the chits and other special for neutrals, strategic moves, etc.

The most notable facet of the game, aside from the chit pull, is the initiative system, where whoever has the initiative on one front has to give it up on the other. For example, at the start of the game the Germans have the initiative in France (Italy is not yet active) while the Russians have it in the East.

After every two or three operational turns there is a strategic turn where victory conditions are checked, reinforcements arrive and new chits are added to the pool.

Physically the game is XTR standard. There are two full-sized Beth Queman maps. The west map has the French and Italian fronts, while the east map depicts the Eastern Front from St. Peterburg to Constantinople. There are more than 800 units from 13 countries included in the game.

The 1/2-inch counters use XTR standard colors for the major powers (French blue, Russian green, British red, German field grey, Austo-Hungarian grey, American olive) and a rainbow of other colors for the various other countries.

Raicer's stated design intent was to eliminated the benefit of hindsight as much as possible. The effect of this is to essentially force the players into refighting the whole war. There is very little scope for winning some kind of decisive victory or doing anything far outside the scope of what happened historically. For example, if the Allies decide to try an amphibious assault on Constantinople they MUST land at Gallipoli, even though the accompanying magazine article points out there were other (perhaps superior) beaches they could have chosen. Even the chits, for the most part, are mechanism for introducing historical events, rather than exploring many things that might have been.

This is a long game. Setting it up by itself will take more than an hour, assuming you've sorted the counters ahead of time. The game could continue for as many as 51 operational turns (to Jun 1919), so it is clearly a multi-session project. Play length for this sort of game is highly dependent on the style of the group, but a total of 40-50 hours is a good start for planning purposes.

Victory is achieved by capturing victory hexes. If the Central Powers capture enough there is a chance they can cause a collapse of Western morale for a sudden death victory. This seems unlikely to occur, however. Even less likely is an Allied sudden death victory, which comes from capturing Berlin or the Ruhr. So most games will turn on the Central Powers attempts to capture 20 victory hexes and hold them during a victory check phase. Every Central Powers city held by the allies reduced the victory hex total by one.

If the game makes it to June 1919 without the Germans getting to 20 then the game ends in a draw. The historical result was the Central Powers player conceding defeat after the October turn as the front disintegrated making the position hopeless.

Recommendations:

(Conditional Yes) for Wargamers: IF you have to have hexes and counters and want to get into a lot of detail, that is. Otherwise you might be better off with Paths of Glory.

(Yes) for Collectors: Unique treatment of the war at this scale and unlikely to be repeated.

(No) for Eurogamers: Like really, really "No."