The Bell of Treason: 1938 Munich Crisis in Czechoslovakia is the next installment in GMT Games’ informal ‘Final Crisis’ series. It is a successor to Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter, which depicts the secession crisis that culminated in the U.S. Civil War, and Fred Serval’s Red Flag Over Paris, which depicts the crisis following the formation of the Paris Commune to its defeat in the Bloody Week of May 1871. As such, The Bell of Treason shares many mechanics with both these games but adapts them to specifically portray different aspects of the Munich Crisis in 1938. During this crisis, British appeasement policy clashed with Czechoslovak readiness to fight Nazi Germany, while the Soviet Union encouraged Czechoslovakia but was seemingly unwilling to provide any concrete military or political support. One of the central game systems is an abstract map showing four dimensions in which the crisis developed. Each ‘Crisis Dimension’ consists of three spaces where arguments and ideals for and against appeasement clashed, with one of them being a ‘Pivotal’ space that has some additional leverage over the other two spaces. This basic system was already present in Fort Sumter, but Red Flag over Paris introduced the novel idea of adjacency between spaces, including some spaces connected by arrows representing unidirectional adjacency. The Bell of Treason reuses this latter system to model some key aspects of the Munich Crisis. Let’s take a look at each of the Dimensions in its historical context.
