It is November, 1946. German resistance collapses as French tanks roll into Berlin. For the typical WWII game, this can’t be possible.

Cataclysm is not your typical WWII game. The game starts in 1933, not 1939. Germany has no Luftwaffe and no panzer armies. France is supreme. Yet from this corner, Germany somehow emerges to wreak havoc in Europe. And Japan is poised to sweep Asia before anyone can stop it.

Japan Attacks China,1933

For test players, Cataclysm is both strange and familiar. Many have a working knowledge of WWII, using it as a template to craft strategy and construct forces. That is not enough in Cataclysm, because the game relies on blind chit pull from an “Action Cup” to bring pieces into play, one at a time. There is no “I Go/You Go”. One can plan by keeping a needed piece in reserve, to play when the time is right. After that, players have limited control over the timing of events.

Guns or Butter?

We’ve all played wargames with an economic component. Take a supply center in Diplomacy and you can build an army or a fleet. Or we would blow through piles of BRPs in Third Reich, building that perfect mechanized army.

There is not much of a leap from these games to Cataclysm. Every nation has a few resource spaces. Units either cost one or two build points. Players manage single-digit budgets.

Russia Attacks Japan, 1945

Unlike other games, Cataclysm ties the size of your wartime economy into political effectiveness and political stability. The more you ramp up your nation’s war economy, the more it will erode political support, eventually causing a collapse of your government and withdrawal from the war.

“Stability checks” will come up every turn when your country’s Home Front chit is pulled. At this point, you will be rolling one or more dice to get a 5 or 6. Succeed and your political situation remains unchanged. Once you get into mobilization and total war, however, you will be making that roll with increasing penalties. Your political stability will erode. We put this feature in to keep players from building huge armies and navies that do…nothing. Once you commit your economy to mobilization or total war, you must fight.

Some test players treated this commitment versus stability mechanic with an abundance of caution. This led them to commit a common strategic error: trying to win the war on a shoestring without having to mobilize the economy. Oftentimes, the “budget” player will find himself eclipsed by more aggressive players who have bulked up their war machines. Being behind on the mobilization curve means fewer offensives and a smaller pool of units to draw from.

In game terms, this is like being France in 1940, with a decent infantry army, a minimal air force and an ineffective armored doctrine. Germany is about to cross the border with a couple of panzer armies and an air force to back each one. Paris falls quickly in that scenario. The lesson here is stark: mobilize early and plan to get violent. At least keep up with your enemies.

Royal Navy Raids German U-Boat Pens, 1939

A fully mobilized player in Cataclysm has few counters to show military strength. A player may be fielding 10-20 pieces, representing the entire naval, land and air strength of his nation. To show expenditure of effort and loss, the game relies on offensive counters—basically the replacements, fuel and ammo needed to “pay” for a campaign. This is the real military currency of the game. And this is a far cry from conventional war games, where the player with the biggest stack of counters usually wins.

As you ramp up your economy, each offensive counter packs more striking power. By the time you are a total war, that offensive can pay for three attacks in three places, or a single attack at a +2 bonus. In a game where all combat is decided by two or three six-sided dice, that +2 DRM advantage becomes substantive. This incentive to “power up” is what should bait the shy player into mobilizing.

At first, our rules called for players to purchase their offensives in anticipation of operations later in the turn. This proved to be too daunting, as players had no frame of reference to budget for x number of attacks per turn. Instead, the game system grants players a fixed number of offensive markers, equal to a nation’s industrial resources, just to remove the headache. Players could focus on what units they needed to build, confident that they will be able to do something with them later.

And nothing stops a player from deliberately purchasing more offensives. It is an opportunity cost. You have to choose what to emphasize.

Flag Waving

Huge armies and navies are nice, but using them to conquer is not the sole method for scoring points. Political capital, represented by national flags, will also limit or expand a player’s freedom of action.

US Attempts Invasion of Japan, 1945

Flags are commonly used to diplomatically woo smaller countries into your political fold. If you gain control of a country that has a resource, it is yours to command. You can also station your units in those allied countries. Players have used this mechanic to explore some unconventional strategies, like turning Scandinavia into pro-Soviet satellites, or placing a French army in pro-French Poland to strategically outflank Germany.

Players gained flags when rivals tried to ally with bordering minor countries. In earlier test play, there was no limit on the number of flags player actions could generate. Take the Benelux countries, which border France, Germany, and Britain (across the English Channel). Every time Germany gained an alliance with Benelux, France and Britain’s interests would be threatened, giving them flags. Then Germany would gain a flag whenever Britain or France got Benelux to switch sides. Eventually this filled the action cup with flags, lengthening play time with little to show for it.

That is when we limited nations to having no more than 3-4 flags. This caps the amount of outrage a power will suffer from provocation. In test play, powers reached “maximum outrage” pretty quickly, but players learned to recycle flags by taking actions (increase commitment, try for alliances, flag smaller countries…).

France and Italy pointed out some weaknesses in our political scheme. These nations have low effectiveness, leaving players only a single die to roll for any political actions. Players handling these two nations would become frustrated when they repeatedly failed to increase their commitment, form alliances or engage in propaganda to shore up their governments.

UK Invades Italy from Sicily, 1945

This is where the “failed attempt” box comes in. When you blow that needed die roll, a control cube belonging to your nation is placed in the box as a reminder to add +1 to the next die roll attempting the same action.

In test play, we’ve seen France make a second or third attempt to increase commitment or ally with the UK. This may be frustrating for the French player, but it does reflect France’s pre-war political chaos very well. The mechanic also underscores the difficulty of mobilizing the democracies to counter the growing threat without foreclosing the possibility of early alliance or mobilization.

Remember that example cited above with French tanks rolling into Berlin in 1946? In that game, France successfully entered rearmament in 1933, responding to Germany’s militarization of the Rhineland. That was a fateful die roll for France, but it made the Third Republic competitive with the Third Reich. The war took a different course.

War is Managed Chaos Masquerading as Strategy

You can’t play a war game without a war. Many war games take care of this problem for you on turn one. In Cataclysm, there is no fixed start date for a war. The burden is on the player to choose when to fight.

This led some players to choose “Sitzkrieg” over “Blitzkrieg,” basically building a big military that looks threatening but does nothing. Once you shift your economy from rearmament to mobilization, you are telegraphing your intent to attack. If you don’t, you will be facing home front checks that will eventually whittle your government down from Stable to Collapse.

Cataclysm gives you no certainty of victory. Yes, you can attack that single army defending Lorraine with your two armies backed by an air force (roll two dice with a +1 bonus for air superiority). But if your opponent rolls a 6 and you roll an adjusted 2, he wins and you lose a lot. Players can pile on every advantage—air superiority, armor, and bonuses from offensive chits—and still run some risk of disappointment.

We’ve seen Paris and Berlin hold out against overwhelming attack. We’ve seen the Italian navy rout the British out of the Mediterranean. We’ve seen D-Day fail. Germany can pull off Sea Lion and invade Britain. The U.S. can execute Olympic to invade the Japanese home islands. These things can be done, with difficulty, but with sufficient commitment. Their outcome is never certain.

US Thrust Towards Okinawa, 1945

All you know is that you have an army, an air force or a fleet. You think your forces are just as good, if not better, than your enemy. You will chance defeat putting your forces—and your strategy—to the test. In some of the test games we’ve run, we have seen the end-result of WWII reproduced. The path that got us there varied a lot. Every game we played was an outlier, yet none seemed implausible.

Author: William Terdoslavich