1918: Storm in the West was my first published design for the late lamented Command Magazine. Plan 1919 was a follow-up addition that covered a What-If? Scenario using additional rules and counters. GMT is publishing a new boxed edition combining the two, so I’m going to take this opportunity to revisit the early days of my career as a war game designer.

But first, what will you get in the new GMT edition? Well for starters, new artwork, including a back-printed map with 1918 on one side and 1919 on the other. The 1918 map also includes start lines for the Allied Counterattack scenario later published in Command. The rules are basically the same-with the errata incorporated. I did however make a change to the 1919 scenario, greatly cutting the French replacements, which I feel was justified historically and also makes the scenario more balanced.

1918 came about because I had designed the game Armies of the Tsar (later published in modified form as When Eagles Fight) which Avalon Hill rejected on the grounds that “World War I doesn’t sell.” Of course it was exactly that attitude that made me start designing Great War games in the first place, since no one else was scratching my itch for games on the subject. At that point I started doing research for a game on the final year of the war on the Western Front. Also at that point I started to buy Command Magazine (which had already been out for over a year). And there in Command Magazine was Ty Bomba’s call for a 1918 game. I responded and the rest is an almost 30-year career as a designer.

The counter limits of Command at the time made it clear it would have to be a corps-level game, which I thought was a problem because by 1918, especially in the German Army, corps were largely administrative units and divisions were the main unit of operations. (I later tackled the subject with divisional units in All Quiet on the Western Front?, which won me a Charles S. Roberts award but is also a bit of a monster game.) So I designed the game with corps units but tracked losses in divisions (rather like the CRPs in the old Strategy and Tactics game), then sent it off to Command.

Command took my design and made two changes. One was a minor change to the victory conditions. The other was the removal of tracking divisional losses (while keeping my original CRT). This was a big change, and as a newly published designer my initial reaction was, “This will never work, they’ve ruined my design!”

Except, it turned out it did work. The game played much as before, but quicker, bloodier, and with less fiddling. It was a lesson to me to me in Less can be More, and that a designer, like a writer, must be willing to “kill your darlings” if it helps the overall design. 1918 was solidly rated by Command’s readers, and I was nominated for a Charlie (Charles S. Roberts award) for the first time. (I would win with my next published game, When Eagles Fight, the redone Armies of the Tsar.)

Having read about J.F.C. Fuller’s plans for a tank-led Allied offensive in 1918, I decided to use it as the basis for a 1919 scenario, assuming the Germans had spent 1918 holding the Allied at bay in Italy and the Balkans, conserving their strength for a defensive showdown in France the following summer. This required additional counters, which Command was willing to provide. This scenario was also well-received, though as noted above, I’ve since concluded I made the exhausted French a little too strong.

One gamer has recently described 1918: SitW as a “knife-fight in a phone booth” and I think that is apt. The German shock troops of 1918 are a potent but wasting resource, while the gradual build-up of US divisions (the only divisional force in the game, but each US division was basically the size of a small Allied corps) means that at some point the Germans know the tide is going to turn, forcing them over to the defense. The attritional CRT (even bloodier once Ty removed the CRP system) and the trench lines combine to make even successful offensives expensive, and the game is often decided at the very end, with the Germans either just holding or finally going under. Though I hope I’ve learned a lot in the years since then, I find 1918/1919 to hold up very well, and will provide gamers an action-packed, clean, but sufficiently historical look at some of the most titanic battles in history.  Enjoy the new edition!

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