Introduction (By CoV Editor Fred Schachter): I had the pleasure of first viewing a gorgeous, virtually professional quality, playtest version of Frank’s Congress of Vienna game some years ago. It was most impressive. At the time I was working and living in the Phoenix, Arizona area and enticed a local gaming buddy (and now good friend) Dick Sauer into sharing my enthusiasm for Frank’s creation and to become CoV’s Game Developer.

Improved versions of the game followed and during 2019 the game was presented at GMT’s Spring “Weekend at the Warehouse” and at the CSW Expo in Tempe, Az. where we had a blast playing games, under Frank’s supervision of course, with myself, Mark Herman, Luke Billingsley, Mark Simonitch, and other wonderful gamers who enjoyed Congress of Vienna’s easily learned mechanics and fun, exciting, action.

Gene Billingsley introduced Frank, a native of Spain who traveled a long way to join the CSW Expo festivities, during the event’s “Meet GMT’s Designers/Developers” session. The rest, as they say, is history and the December 2019 GMT Update announced Congress of Vienna as a new P-500 addition. 

This article introduces Frank to InsideGMT’s readership and provides information and background regarding Frank and his game. If you wish to meet Frank, Dick, and their local team of play testers, as well as a GMT delegation, there’ll be opportunity to do so during January 2020’s Bellota Con III gaming gathering in Badajoz, Spain. With that… take it away Frank!

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Genesis of a Game Designer

In essence, I am basically a game player rather than a designer. I live in a small town in the southwest of Spain (where the word “wargamer” is a synonym for someone who is a freak or mad, or perhaps a bit of both). I started playing wargames in 1975, first with Napoleonic miniatures using 1½” lead figures and then, ah the revelation! I met the mythical Avalon Hill Game Company with its hexagons, combat result tables, die-rolling excitement, and “terrible” rule books. In fact, I had to learn English to be able to read the rules of those classic games (Remember, I am Spanish and during my high school experience; I solely studied French as a foreign language).

Ah, those wonderful days of my gaming youth! When Avalon Hill disappeared I was bereft and “orphaned”. I almost entirely forgot my passion for wargames (with exception of one last and priceless jewel like “Hannibal”) and dedicated myself to reading about politics and strategy in major conflicts from antiquity to today. But my special interest and passion focused on the Napoleonic Wars and conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Happily, GMT Games appeared with all the good things about Avalon Hill, but with a lot of fresh air both in their games’ designs and mechanics; as well as in GMT’s concept about developing games and in how it so superbly interacts with its valued customers. Bless the internet for introducing me to GMT!

In fact, I love card driven games (CDG) such as “For the People”, “Paths of Glory”, “Crusade & Revolution”, “Hannibal”, “Here I Stand”, and “Virgin Queen”, not only for the pleasure of playing them, but also as they address my interests in examining warfare from grand strategy rather than tactical aspects.

The Inspiration to Design “Congress of Vienna”

I was re-reading various books on the Napoleonic Wars like “The Spanish Ulcer” and “The Napoleonic Wars 1803-1815” by David Gates, while simultaneously enjoying enormously Mark Herman’s excellent “Churchill” game based on the great strategies and diplomacy of World War II. I then realized in an “aha moment” there was no such game for the Napoleonic Wars.

Soon the dormant game designer living inside me was awakened and got moving. Unlike Mark Herman’s game, which was a complete innovation for our hobby; I had a path blazed for me by the great success and precedent he implemented with “Churchill”. Therefore, “Congress of Vienna” would benefit from the previous learnings of “Churchill” players who would already know the core rules and mechanics of my game.

Why did I choose the title “Congress of Vienna”? Due to the game having diplomacy as a key and central mechanic, calling the game “Congress of Vienna” seems so evocative of the “wheeling and dealing” indulged in by the Great Statesmen of the time: political machinations which drove much of what occurred militarily, that it seemed just a right and proper title for what I envisioned for the game (despite its historical time period taking place before the actual Congress commenced). I decided to entitle the game Congress of Vienna because it was a decisive event in European History that brought a peace lasting a hundred years and ended an almost uninterrupted 25 years of vicious general warfare.

Additionally, last year in Tempe, I was questioned about the lack of suitability of the “Congress of Vienna” title; since the game covers the last 14 months of the 1813-1814 campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars and not the Congress itself. It should be noted that during the period the game covers, there were numerous attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement between the different belligerent nations; and the end of the war resulted in a general peace agreement that subsequently became known as “The Congress of Vienna”.

In the game, in addition to numerous military aspects such as leadership, battles, retreats, and recruitment; the political issues discussed during the actual Congress of Vienna are of great importance: What is done with Saxony? How will Italy be organized? Poland: among whom is its territory distributed? Does Hanover return to old King George of Britain or do the Prussians take a bite out of him? What will happen to Norway? What is done with Belgium and Holland? When will Austria join the Allies in the fight against Napoleon? Will a lasting Armistice be established or will the guns’ stillness last but a matter of days? The beauty of our gaming hobby is that players can alter what historically occurred and thereby better appreciate the forces behind this fascinating period.

Apart from numerous Diplomacy Issues (more numerous than those of “Churchill”) the design places a variety of non-military characters who had great weight in the actual pre-official Congress of Vienna efforts during 1813-1814’s negotiations, conventions, and congresses. Among those “Great Statesmen” that the game highlights are: Metternich, Talleyrand, Castlereagh, von Getz, Nesselrode, Tsar Alexander, and others.

Of course, military leaders, from the brilliant to the mundane, who participated in the campaigns of Germany and France, as well as the Peninsular War, War of 1812 and in the “secondary” Italian Front, are not forgotten; for they too seized my imagination and have an important role in the game and its players’ pursuit of victory.

Background: “Congress of Vienna’s” GMT Journey

GMT Games’ December 2019 announcement of “Congress of Vienna” as a P-500 offering was a dream come true for me. When I started this game design journey, such an occurrence seemed as “likely as getting a triple dice roll of three straight ones”.

The first leg of this odyssey was my daughter Ana working a year in Seattle’s financial sector: a very exciting learning opportunity for her outside of Spain. Expecting that (during my visit with her) I might be bored in the States without my beloved gaming hobby, she contacted the Metro Seattle Gamers (MSG) club.

That’s why I went from Spain to Seattle (a 20 hour flight) both to visit her and to meet MSG’s Scot McConnachie. He encouraged me to teach him the game, to discover the possibilities of it, then introduced me to Nathan Geiser to coordinate local play testers and improve my lovely “Congress of Vienna”, which at the time was an entirely handmade wargame. Above all, I got much needed help in how I could improve my writing in English for wargame design.

Next, Nathan encouraged me to contact Fred Schachter for guidance regarding the possibility of publishing my game (who, coincidentally, was involved with MSG during his years living and working in Seattle. It’s sometimes a small world is it not?). Fred, who has experience as a game designer/developer, encouraged me to continue forward and helped me present it for GMT Games’ consideration. This commenced a path leading to “Congress of Vienna’s” December 2019 P-500 Announcement.

As conclusion for this part of my story, I have known the spirit of Americans. They are welcoming, kind, enterprising, and often passionate about their likes & dislikes; attitudes which can “clash” with my European mentality: which can be more cynical, conservative and individualistic. Thanks America! For all this, the ideas and vision for this game could not have been put in practice without the collaboration of my daughter Ana, the Seattle play testers coordinated by Nathan, the background efforts by Scot, and finally by Fred’s guidance and urging me to push on. Their contributions are crucial to the success of this hard work and transitioning “Congress of Vienna” from concept into publishable reality, so thank you very much to all of them!

How is “Congress of Vienna” similar to “Churchill”? What is really different?

This is a design based on “Churchill” and has turn phases for diplomatic, economic, and negotiation player action as well as for military aspects.

“Congress of Vienna” can accommodate up to four players instead of “Churchill’s” three. It has a common deck of staff cards and the possibility of exchanging staff cards between players. Players can receive different amounts of staff and event cards according to their controlled-spaces on the game’s military display. There are also some staff and event cards which may be used in the subsequent War Phase.

The game’s military mechanics are concentrated in a second phase, after Diplomacy, giving it much more content, complexity, and uncertainty than in “Churchill”. Here I had opportunity to do a bit of homage to “War and Peace”, the excellent Mark McLaughlin designed Avalon Hill game of the 1980’s with its “tactical battle matrix”; which is now an optional rule. We will see what transpires when the developer and play testers further “analyze” this for the “Congress of Vienna” game.

I maintained the sequence of “Churchill”, in which the first card played defines the tone of a turn. This procedure of “proposal of questions” allows each player to establish their turn’s diplomatic, economic, and military strategy on an overview basis. It includes Britain and France’s trade and maritime war, the war in America between Britain and the still fledgling USA, political and diplomatic activity, as well as military operations carried out by each Major Power for the turn. We also “protected” the French player against their Coalition opponents becoming too ahistorically coordinated by a rule which makes it difficult to take out Issues located upon the French National Track.

I followed the experience and trailblazing path of Mark Herman with our Seattle and Spaniard play testers in designing many game elements; but created more uncertainty in the initial set of cards (conferences in “Churchill”). Thus, you will find that version A of the initial situation deck is related more closely to actual events, while versions B and C introduce alternative historical situations for players to contend with. As a new option we created a deck of handicap cards that are used to create more variability (and therefore playability) and “help” new players against those more experienced.

Perhaps what I like least in “Churchill” is that the “Evil Axis Powers” neither have a voice nor a seat in the game; they are simply “robots”. Although I understand a game based on negotiation with Hitler or Hirohito’s Tojo is an historical absurdity; during the Napoleonic Wars there was a great deal of relationships between the French Empire and Coalition Powers.

They communicated with one another and at times communicated extensively. So for this reason I wanted players to experience a game narrative as one of the four Leaders of Europe’s Major Powers; each striving to win the war while gaining influence over allies, or in the case of France, dividing its opponents, and control as many of Europe’s minor nations as possible in the peace that follows.

This concludes article Part 1 of 2.  The next segment will encompass:

• The Leaders and “Great Statesmen” of Congress of Vienna
• Genesis of CoV’s Map Board and Game Appeal to Eurogamers
• Designing National Asymmetries
• Channeling the History

Hopefully, the preceding has further piqued your interest in Congress of Vienna.

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