Let’s begin with a school question: when did WWII start? The generally acknowledged answer is September 1, 1939. But if we define war as a state of actual armed hostilities, regardless of a formal declaration of war, we may find that the answer is not so simple. During the Munich Crisis of 1938 (and here we are talking about the time before the Munich Agreement was signed), paramilitary groups of Sudeten Germans trained and armed in Germany, with headquarters near Bayreuth, were operating within Czechoslovak territory. Small numbers of SS and Wehrmacht personnel (usually company-sized units) even crossed the border to fight there too, carrying out raids and kidnapping hundreds of Czechoslovaks, many of whom would later die in German concentration camps. The Bell of Treason may focus on the conflict of ideas between conceding the Sudetenland or standing up against Germany, but during the same period terror and killing had already started in the Sudetenland. In this article we will look at how the game depicts Germans in two different ways: political and military.

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.