We’re excited to be adding Cataclysm to our P500 list this coming week. This is the first of several planned articles by William and Scott to give you guys insight into what this game is all about. Enjoy! – Gene
———————
In the wargaming hobby, every war has to fit into a box. When it comes to World War II, the challenge can be a bit problematic. You can make the war fit, but only by leaving parts of it out. Or you can make a bigger game and put it in a bigger box.
Cataclysm takes neither approach. This game is unlike any World War II game you have played before. It is about grand strategy. You have to worry about politics, diplomacy and economics as well as air, naval and land warfare. And you will not have the benefit of hindsight.
The game begins in 1933, not 1939. France stands ten feet tall. Germany can barely stand. No player has vast armies and fleets at their command. They don’t exist yet. So how do you recreate the history of World War II? The answer is, “You might, but you might not.†A global war is possible, not definite. It can start in Poland, or elsewhere. It can happen earlier—or later—than 1939. It might not even involve the United States.
Breaking History
Every World War II game relies on actual events to form the baseline. I wanted to treat the war as an outlier. Many of the WWII games I played, while a lot of fun, concentrated on fighting the actual war, usually with an operational focus. But the more I read about the pre-war period, the more I began to see it as an “approach march†to the actual conflict. This frames the war to come.
While a rematch of The Great War of 1914-18 was a possibility in the 1930s, many national leaders and diplomats sought desperately to avoid it or postpone it. While seeking peace, they still had to plan for war. That often meant fixating on a likely enemy and building a force pool to implement a strategy against that adversary. This created an arms race, with Germany and Italy taking the lead, forcing other powers to follow. As Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union used coercive diplomacy and brute force to redraw the pre-war map of the world, the growing threat provoked Britain, France, and the United States to do something about it. Reaction was never certain and not always effective. That mechanism of action and reaction became the inspiration for Cataclysm’s flag-based political system, as well as its force pool expansion and unit choices.
Cataclysm’s 1933 start date allows players more latitude to craft alternate strategies. Opportunity costs become apparent. France forgoing the Maginot Line would allow it to build a mobile army or a stronger air force. Maybe Italy could construct an aircraft carrier, but at the cost of not refitting its old battleships. Germany could have a go at building a strategic air force. Russia could launch a big navy, if it wanted to. Japan could make an ideal force for going north against Russia—or south against China and the European colonies.
Cataclysm would let players freely explore any course of action within national limits. The game would be agnostic if a strategy was shrewd or foolish. The incentives for conquest (resource areas) would be laid out on a simple political map. There would be no script to follow. Players would be little more than strategic amateurs chasing prizes, much like their historical predecessors.
“Of Course You Know, This Means War!†—Bugs Bunny (after Groucho Marx)
After all the political and economic stuff, I still wanted to play a wargame. But I did not want to go the traditional route, with factored pieces and a combat results table. The actual war leaders did not have the benefit of this convention. Neither should the players of Cataclysm.
In real life, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, and Reynaud all knew they had armed forces at their command. They might have a rough understanding of their quality. Most were confident, or over-confident, that their land, sea, and air forces would prevail over the enemy. Things did not always work out that way. Victory and defeat could be unexpected—and stunning. The previous time Germany and France fought, the war lasted four years. The rematch only took six weeks, and no one expected the outcome.
Hard-factored unit ratings fail to capture this, as unit strengths in conventional wargames stay constant throughout the paper conflict. That reflects known thinking about unit quality and equipment, something the average wargamer can talk about for hours. Thus we can be confident that when Germany invades France, France will fall given its inferiority in armor and air units, quantified by the factoring on the French pieces when compared to the German units.
Cataclysm does not need to reproduce actual outcomes this way. It merely has to allow the probable to happen, simply and organically. When two nations commit their armies to battle, the side with more units and greater support has a better chance of winning, but it is not entirely certain. Improbable victories and defeats like Midway and Case Yellow did happen. Cataclysm will allow the improbable to occur as well. Uncertainty is the only thing you can be sure of in this game.
I also wanted to keep the game math simple. Playing a wargame for hours can be mentally exhausting, as you add up factors, calculate ratios and consult the CRT. Add an economic system with a detailed price list to this and by game’s end you feel like you just filled out your tax return. To ease play, combat resolution would be based on opposing die rolls, with a limited menu of simple modifiers to capture reality without surrendering to complexity. Resource production and unit price lists were kept in the single digits to avoid number crunching. Keying the combat power of offensives to correspond with economic commitment allows players to alter the strength of their units and split actions rather than printing a multitude of counters with varying factors.
Cataclysm is not Axis & Allies on Steroids, It is Third Reich on Quaaludes.
The end result is a game that should be easy to learn, but hard to play. Cataclysm taps into the creative heritage of Risk and Diplomacy, as well as a basic Euro-game approach towards making simple but important decisions. This philosophy made it easy to apply an overlay of politics, economics, and war fighting over a simple area- map game without becoming un-historical.
While all this looks easy in design and execution, it was not. I am good at history. I was clueless when it came to crafting the game’s mechanics. I was lucky—and grateful—to run into Scott Muldoon. His game experience proved instrumental in bringing my wooly ideas from orbit down to earth. And for this I am more than willing to credit him as co-designer of this game.
As we batted ideas back and forth, we tried as much as possible to phrase our schemes as starting points for discussion, usually arriving at an understandable consensus. Throughout design and play testing, Cataclysm would always be a game with simple, global rules; binary but uncertain outcomes; opportunity costs; and a commitment to showing strategic warfare while avoiding the operational temptation.
I will leave it to Scott to describe the work of turning my creative mess into a game. But in the meantime, remember that Cataclysm is the first war game to be designed by two stay-at-home dads from Queens. I am glad we are first in something!
Author: William Terdoslavich
Well, Mr. William Terdoslavich is your game is as well crafted as this posting, you have a world beater here. Well done, Sir.
Thanks!
We had plenty of time to work on it, so we expect a clean game.
I liked the simplicity of the alternative approach! I definitely would love to try – for at least once – the “what if” path of play. Starting in 1933 and giving me the possiblilty to handle the situation, as I think would be more appropriate, is a very tempting option to leave it unattended…
Looking foward to its announce at the P500!
Anything can happen. Weirdest “outlier” was seeing France march into Berlin in the late-1945 turn (1946?). The player was Quebecois, and you never saw a bigger smile on a gamer’s face.
Sold
Thank you.
Pretty much this. I’ve not been much for “traditional” WW2 wargames (mostly because I’m rather bad at them), but this seems quite intriguing, and having a fair amount of replay value, too (always good).
This game appears to be a fantastic tool for exploring the “what-ifs” along the road to war. My favorite aspect of Advanced Third Reich and A World at War is the diplomacy and the chance of Turkey or Spain to join the Axis or the Allies. Your game promises to have this and much, much more.
A couple of question, if I may. First of all, are the images we’re seeing your playtest version or will the map and counters be upgraded for the actual production?
Secondly, will you be considering scenarios that begin earlier than 1933, say 1919? or later into the 1950s?
I have to say I am a bit surprised you do not have a technology development component in the game as the fortunes of WWII belligerents turned on the successful emerging technologies — the A-Bomb being a classic case in point. In fact, you even note in your write up that Germany may build a strategic air force and then mention “opportunity costs.” Is this an abstract means of getting at technology development?
Regardless of these minor question, please know that I think your concept is fantastic and will be an “early adapter” in the P-500 preorders! Congratulations on what sounds like a superb game!
Good morning, Don–
Let me address the tech question first, since I also focused on it a bit in the design process.
Much of WWII was fought with pretty much the same technology for all sides. Yes, there were some notable improvements and iterations, but most of the technology during the war evolved.
Trying to bend the curve to one’s favor, one could gamble on a revolutionary technology working out. For Germany, that meant jet aircraft and short-range ballistic missiles. Investment in these programs would rob other programs of budget and resources. (This is what I meant by “opportunity costs”. If you do one thing, you cannot do another if you can only make one choice.)
New technology in general is very problematic. You are trying to do something new for the first time, and you are expending a lot of craftmanship and brainpower to get something new to barely work. The ME-262 flew great, but the engines had a 100-flight hour service life., on average. The V-2 could only carry one ton of high explosives, making it a very expensive improvement over a two-engine bomber doing the same mission at the same range. These designs are much improved–today we can fire a missile half-way around the world and nuke a city. We have jets that have service lives measured in decades with engines that can run more than a few few thousand hours before requiring an overhaul. (But I digress.)
The only new technology fielded that was a radical break from its decade was the A-bomb. Germany had a nuke program, but only had the means to try and build a nuke just once. The program did not advance because no one was entirely sure which research approach would yield a result. The US (with a UK head start assist) built two different A-bombs, each using a different method of construction and operation, and they both worked. For the US, the program cost was very pricey, but we had the money and it only took 2-3 years to get both weapons.
In the game, the nuke simply gets abstracted. It is assumed the US has the program and will achieve a result once it goes to total war, which it did in real life in 1944-45. While the ME-262 and the V-2 were early 1950s technology appearing in 1945, neither made a critical difference to the outcome of the war.
When you are dealing with two-year turns and the movement of massive armies and fleets, the type of equipment you operate (all of it technologically similar) matters a little less. Those details, important in an operational level game, fall away when you get up to grand strategy. At that point, you are looking at commiting resources to build weapons and units and then deploying them to fight. So it was easier to assume that nations applying more resources to their war effort will prevail, because the resource expediture results in better/more “stuff”.
Now about scaling the game for 1910-1930 or 1950-70, that takes in a far different set of parameters.
First, there already is a really good WWI game, “Paths of Glory”, also put out by GMT, along with its offshoots. While World War One was a global war, the extra-European theaters played less of a role in shaping the course of the war, except for the Middle East. Much of the war was “static” as generals had to figure out how to shift the conflict from siege/attrition to mobile warfare. I think PoG captures the dilemmas of the war and I am not sure if I could top it.
Looking at the decades leading up to the war, however, might give you some scope to model the world situation, setting down the initial conditions and seeing what happens next. At that point, the game may or may not result in a general war. As a remake of Diplomacy, it would be interesting. But I don’t see as much “conventional design heritage” to bend/break as I did with WWII.
I think this may become a big seller – I’m sold at least. It will be very interesting to see what strategies the players devise. Do you treat each county the same with the differences being industrial potential and geographical?
There are going to be some “tweak differences.” France and Italy have less political effectiveness.
Different nations also have varying force pools limits–number of counters keyed to commitment levels. While you get to choose the composition of the force pool, you will be limited to a maximum number of units.
So players are free to construct any force structure they wish, constrained by the economic limits of their country. That will be further affected by that nation’s political effectiveness as it also pursues political and diplomatic strategies.
Any ideas what the production set will look like? I’m guessing the pictures are just the play testing, but I was curious if there would be counters like the above or war-game type pieces like A&A has. One of the fun things about A&A is the fact it has the various pieces and chips to indicate multiple units.
It’s a lot more fun (and a lot easier) to move those types of pieces than chiclets.
My pre-order is in!
Thanks!
Peter
Thank you for pre-ordering.
The pieces as you see them belong to the playtest kit. But the production version will embody the “design philosophy” behind the pieces and the way they interact with the map.
Stacking is only two counters of each type per space, knocked down to one per each type in areas with limited infrastructure (think Siberia, SE Asia, parts of North Africa and Russia). So we won’t be following the lead of A&A’s use of “poker chips” to show multiple units.
This brings the game closer to “Diplomacy” in spirit. You don’t have very many counters, and you are expecting much from them.
Hi Peter,
The pieces cannot be plastic figures because all the military units in the game must match in form with the Flags and other markers provided. Units and markers are put into an “Action Cup” and drawn randomly to enter the game. This randomizes the sequence of play, intermixing production, political, and military actions — providing a lot of the game’s tension.
Sounds great. Can I expect support into Belgium?
Only air support, if air forces are based in adjacent areas. Limit: two per space.
You should post this article on the page for this game, not just the link. It sold me, and I was less than impressed by the picture and wasn’t going to act until I read this. Now I’m signing up for the p500.
The game sounds just great. I’m looking forward to it! I have enjoyed operational games for some time, but have always liked the higher-level view, as in Diplomacy. Thanks for offering such an interesting-sounding new take on a very well-worn game theme. ! But I have one suggestion and hope it is not too late:
One thing I get tired of is seeing in almost every WWII game is box art that highlights German/Nazi imagery. Sure, they had arguably the snappiest uniforms in the war. But it would be very nice, indeed, and maybe a positive step forward to have box art that did not focus primarily on Nazis in a bespoke SS uniforms. Since the game is “global”, how about more representational imagery from the different combatants? A good artist should be able to make even a soldier in the US Army look exciting.
George, thanks for your kind words and your interest.
None of the final art for the game has been produced at this stage. When it comes to the cover design, if I have anything to say about it, it will NOT feature any German or Nazi uniforms or symbols. In fact, I’d rather it not have the usual leader portraits of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, FDR, etc. I’d like to go for something somber and haunting, strikingly bold. But we’re still quite a ways from making these sorts of decisions.
Scott,
Thanks for the reply. I like your thinking, at least for the strikingly bold part and the avoidance of cliched covers. Not sure about haunting and somber, though. Don’t we want to see a possibility of optimism as well, or at least the contrast of the moods? I think that is one of the selling points of the game, right: The possibility that war can be avoided (at least for some), but the equal possibility it will not. Keep the thoughts churning, Scott!