Part One
For the past several months, I’ve been involved in the latest round of playtesting for Fields of Despair.  I’m playtesting with a couple of my regular wargaming buddies (Phil Mowatt and Dave Moseley) using VASSAL and Skype. After about 7 or 8 games, in which each of the short scenarios as well as a couple of campaign games were played, we were impressed that this is a game that invites repeated plays.  This is at least partially due to the great variety of possible strategies and outcomes that it offers.  I realize that the purpose of playtesting is to determine whether the game has balance issues or incomprehensible/contradictory rules or a variety of other problems, but because this game has been tested for several years by a fairly large and varied group of people, my fellow playtesters and I weren’t finding any gaping holes in the rules.
It occurred to me, however, that one of the roles of the playtester is to try to “break” the game (lest the punters, when they get their hands on the final product, break it themselves). One thing I’ve noticed in the many games covering the Western Front in 1914 (and beyond) is that the rules usually encourage the player to conform to what happened historically, that is, to invade neutral Belgium. Â Some games I have encountered actually penalize players who do not invade Belgium by way of scripting or victory point losses or whatever. Â After all, if it was good enough for Alfred von Schlieffen, it should be good enough for the average wargamer. Â I am happy to report that Fields of Despair is not one of those games.
The Un-Schlieffen Plan
Using the historical set-up for the campaign game, with the bulk of Central Powers (“CP”) forces poised to cross the Belgian frontier, I decided to see if I could instead attack France solely along the Franco/German border. I hoped to therefore limit the strength of the Allied Powers (“AP”) to the French army alone.  I reasoned that leaving the Belgian and, consequently, the British army out of the equation, the preponderance of strength that the German Army holds over its French counterpart in the opening stages of the war would compensate for the  advantages that such an attack would give to the AP.  Those advantages are twofold: the French would have to defend a front about one half as long as if the CP had attacked through Belgium (only 6 hexes instead of 13), and; the attack would have to be made against the most heavily fortified part of the French frontier (there are 6 fortresses in the vicinity – Verdun, Toul, Nancy, Epinal, Belfort and Langres).
The rules, as they stood when I decided to go off the reservation, allowed only the CP player to violate Belgian neutrality. Â Accordingly, the AP was unable to bring the Belgians in on their own. Â As for the British, they would only enter the fray if Belgian neutrality were violated, or failing that, if and only if more than 5 hexes of French territory were controlled by the CP.
My aim, then, was to capture one or more of the Victory Point (“VP”) hexes along the Franco-German border (any of the aforementioned fortresses) during Turns 1-3 when the rules award VPs to the CP for these objectives, while limiting my advance to capturing no more the 5 French hexes (the triggering condition for British entry if Belgium is neutral). Â That way, I could get an early VP lead then hunker down and defend my tiny enclave of French territory against a seriously depleted French army – an army, I hasten to add, that would not thereafter be reinforced by the British due to the minimal amount of French soil under CP control.
Verdun, 1914
Shifting forces south from the border with Belgium was accomplished by passing through Luxembourg while carefully avoiding the hexes of Belgium. Â Although it did take longer than I had expected, due to the barrier created by the Ardennes, I was in good position to hit the French lines between St. Mihiel and the hex north of Belfort with the greater part of available CP forces by the second action phase. Â I left the Belgian border completely unprotected.
End Turn 1
End Turn 2
It seemed somewhat unsubtle, in that there was little manoeuvre involved. Â I just launched everything I could in this confined space and hoped that attrition would eventually give me the breakthrough I needed. Â This is not an approach for the faint of heart, as the losses were horrendous on both sides. Â One advantage of the approach, however, is that CP reinforcements arriving from Coblenz had a much shorter distance to travel and could actually get involved in the fighting on the second action phase of the same game turn in which they were received. Â This is something that doesn’t usually happen if the CP marches through Belgium. Â The French reinforcements from Paris, on the other hand, had a long way to march to get to the front way down in the Vosges Mountains. Â As the CP, I was using a lot of precious logistics points in order to keep pounding away at the French fortresses with Big Bertha and the AP was using them to reinforce combats by bringing in reserves from adjacent hexes.
Dave was playing the AP while Phil observed and commented on the action.  Phil’s most memorable comment was to the effect that I was attempting to “bleed the French army white”, a là Verdun, but two years earlier than they did historically.
At the end of Turn 3, which coincides with the end of 1914, the CP had captured the fortresses at Epinal and Toul for 2 VPs while the AP picked up 3 bonus VPs because of the small amount of French soil under CP control. Â The French were in dire straits, having taken so many casualties, and had pulled back from the front to ensure that Paris was protected and to (hopefully) lure the CP in to charging headlong into France and triggering British entry. Â We took a break to report our progress back to the designer, Kurt Keckley, at this point. Â Then the playtesting got really interesting.
End Turn 3
Intermission, or A Designer Improvises on the Fly
Kurt came up with some ad hoc rules to deal with what we all agreed was a somewhat historically implausible situation. Â Realistically speaking, why would the CP suddenly halt their advance a short distance into France after they had decimated the French army and the remnants of that army had retreated deep into their homeland? Â The ad hoc rules dealt with the question of Belgian entry by making it possible for the AP to march through Belgian territory with Belgian permission, which was represented by a die roll using modifiers which were cumulative with the passage of time and/or the expenditure of Economic Points (“EPs”). Â The latter mechanism represented AP diplomatic efforts to convince Belgium to join the Alliance. Â We allowed the CP the option to counter those diplomatic efforts by the expenditure of their own EPs.
British entry was made conditional on a die roll, which was also subject to a modifier that increased with the passage of time, although automatic triggering upon the capture of more than five French hexes by the CP also remained as an alternate trigger.
We completed the rest of the game using the newly-minted rules. Â As it turned out, Â the Belgians came in on the first turn of 1915 when the AP player rolled a lucky 6 after spending 1 EP. Â The CP spent nothing to counter this expenditure. Â The AP fell short on their first roll to bring in the British, but they abandoned their neutrality automatically on the next turn as the CP advanced much deeper into France when it became too tempting to resist. Â In the long run, the non-Schlieffen strategy worked for the CP, as they managed to hang on to all of their baseline occupied hexes in France each turn until the end of Turn 8. Â By then, they had a 7 to 3 VP lead. Â Despite the collapse of parts of the CP line on the final turn, the AP were unable to re-occupy enough hexes in France to turn the tide. Â The final VP score was 7-5 in favour of the CP.
The CP strategy from Turn 4 onward was to hang on to the French baseline hexes at all costs, while ignoring AP advances in Belgium and North Germany. Â Because those latter hexes do not figure in the victory calculation, they can be safely ignored in the campaign game unless the AP advances in those areas to the point where they threaten to cut off CP supply to the occupied French hexes.
End of Game
What’s Next?
It appears that my strategy of avoiding Belgium had the potential to unbalance the game, even using the ad hoc rules, so Kurt sat down, consulted with developer Mike Bertucelli and devised a more rigorous set of rules to deal with the gambit, while still leaving it open to players to explore this strategic possibility. Â In the second part of this article, I will examine the revised rules and report on how they worked in further playtest sessions.
-Ed Pundyk
Author: Ed Pundyk
Surely the driving force behind the outflanking plan (call it what one will) was the desire to encircle and destroy the French armies with lightning speed (relatively speaking) so as to cause the collapse of France and end the war on the western front before Russia could effectively mobilize. The German armies in the west could then be gathered up and thrown east to join the German and Austro-Hungarian forces that had (in theory) been holding the Russians at bay. The combined CP forces then would crush the Russians, whom Germany regarded as the “real” enemy.
I get that the game depicts only the western front. But surely what should be giving the CP VPs is not holding onto a small (or even a moderate) part of France. What should be driving CP VP accumulation is the destruction of the Allied armies, either in the short term through the planned coup-de-main, or (as they historically hoped to do) through attrition leading to a complete breakthrough (what historically happened to the Germans). If the Germans can win by simply grabbing a small part of France’s frontiers and sitting on it, it seems as if something is seriously broken.
It seems fairly unlikely to me that Belgium would enter the war without being attacked directly. It was difficult for them to allow the French and British into Belgium even after the Germans were clearly attacking them. On the other hand, Britain may have entered even if Belgium had not.
Furthermore, if Germany really wanted to go after Russia, it seems to me that they could have done so quite effectively if they had seized some terrain in France and then gone on the defensive. The much shorter trench lines would have required less German resources to defend.
Eric:
You’re right, the Belgians were reluctant to get involved and they would have been less so had the Germans not invaded their country. I believe that’s why Kurt set the bar quite high for Belgian entry under the circumstances outlined in the article. It requires a roll of 6 or higher, which can be modified by Resource Points being spent by the Allies. I don’t know if I made this clear above, but Resource Points are always far too scarce in this game. You never have enough of them. If you choose to spend them on diplomatic efforts to bring the Belgians into the war, you’re going to find yourself short of points to help your military endeavours.
With respect to your second paragraph, once again we are in agreement. The beauty of Fields of Despair is that it allows you to explore the possibility you have outlined.
“Furthermore, if Germany really wanted to go after Russia, it seems to me that they could have done so quite effectively if they had seized some terrain in France and then gone on the defensive. The much shorter trench lines would have required less German resources to defend.”
What would have been the value in seizing French territory? That would have required a significant expenditure of manpower to break through the French frontier defenses, only to stop? Much better, if they planned only to defend, to do so on their own territory, which they could fortify and prepare ahead of time, than to stage a partial offensive which would require enough troops to make the fighting in the East unsuccessful but not enough to defeat France.
Read up on the history. For one thing, trench warfare was something that *none* of the European warplanners expected, so considerations based on it wouldn’t have gone into anyone’s planning.
But more importantly, the German General Staff spent *decades* planning for this war. They had several different strategic-operational plans based on different possible contingencies and different options that they could engage. We don’t have to guess at what they might have tried; they laid out a variety of different contingencies in great detail. And those provide a very clear view of what their objective were; they were not, in strategic terms, territorial. They were the defeat of the enemy army in the field.
Hi Jan,
Part of our motivation for posting this article was to give the reader a true behind the scenes look at the types of issues that arise during play testing, our thoughts and subsequent steps to meet these challenges.
As you mention, a primary and many times quite successful strategy of the German player is to sweep around the French army. Experienced players report feeling the urgency of the sweep and lament when the Allies manage to slow their advance. Most VPs are awarded based upon position which strongly encourages historical play. They are positional objectives which simply cannot be met without, as you mention, doing everything you can to destroy or surround the Allied armies (as a side note VP objectives change as the war changes. 1914 objectives differ from 1915-16, differ from1917-18). All that said, we have also wanted to keep the game as open as possible to alternative strategies. A common example is the attempt to capture the channel ports before turning south.
“If the Germans can win by simply grabbing a small part of France’s frontiers and sitting on it, it seems as if something is seriously broken.”
We all agree with that statement and immediately went to work to rectify it. Consider this game outlined above, the Central player attempted to walk the tight rope of British and Belgian entry and the Allied player did not have an answer. In development that leads us to ask a number of questions as a group. Did the Allies make any major mistakes? You may note Allied play was not very aggressive. Was there a better defensive strategy that might have prevented the advance? Could they have scored enough points to counter the victory? Then we address the rules as written and look for holes for the rules lawyers to play in. Sometimes the answer is one or the other and sometimes it’s a combination of both. In this particular example we began work with the rules mid-game. The players are now flipping sides to test strategy end of it.
BTW – all of our previous games we’ve tried this strategy; the Germans were stopped at the forts and lost miserably. But those games don’t make for interesting articles.
Kurt
Thanks for your reply, Kurt! It’s nice to get such timely feedback to comments!
But I think you may have missed the point of my observations. You say that “Most VPs are awarded based upon position which strongly encourages historical play.” But that’s just what I’m saying I disagree with. Awarding players for seizing and holding ground is not going to lead them to act in accordance with the war aims of the contesting powers.
The goal of the German armed forces was not to occupy terrain. It was (under Aufsmarch II West, the strategic-operational plan that was eventually implemented) to crush the French armies swiftly, so as to free up forces to defeat Russia in the east. The same was true for France’s Plans XVI and XVII. Both sides were looking, not to hold ground, but to deal knock-out blows to the opposing army, either in an intitial offensive or in a countterpunch after halting an initial invasion.
So I’d strongly advocate for VP awards based not on position but on how much damage each can do to the other’s *armies* at the least cost to themselves.
> “It appears that my strategy of avoiding Belgium had the potential to unbalance the game”
This seems to traditionally be a problem with western front WWI. Both the Schlieffen Plan and Plan XVII constrained the belligerents to rather suboptimal choices.
Simulating 1914 (or at least explaining why the Marne happened) seems to take some thought — how can a game designer convince the German player to ignore the BEF and the French player to ignore their Belgian flank?
Kevin:
Stay tuned. In the second part of this article I will report on how Kurt’s revised rules handle this thorny problem. Playtesting will recommence in the New Year.
Congrats on what looks like an interesting design. Glad to see GMT delving more deeply into strategic-level block wargames (Triumph and Tragedy awesome, hope this continues the trend).
In the interest of service, please allow me to point out a couple possible map typos I noticed. I apologize in advance if the map has already been or is scheduled to be proofread and revised.
1) Cologne is misspelled “Colonge”
2) Kaiserslautern is misspelled “Kaiserlautern”
3) Saarbru(umlaut)cken might be misspelled as “Sarrebrucken” (presumably because Die Saar is La Sarre in French). If the intention is to render Saarbrucken in French, it should be Sarrebruck. That said, why would it be identified in French on a WWI map? It did not come under French political control until 1920.
4) Similarly, why render Luxembourg in German (unless that is a dynamic feature of this particular vassal module reflecting German control, in which case kudos!)?
Thanks for your input, Aaron. What you’re seeing is the playtest version of the VASSAL module – it was based on an extant map that clearly had several glaring errors. The graphics will be re-done for the published version and place names will be corrected. Cheers!
The map names in Germany will all be changed on the final map. A play tester in Germany was kind enough to provide me with all of the correct German spellings.