In his 2018 release Fort Sumter, Mark Herman laid the foundations for what has now come to be known informally as the Final Crisis ‘system’ (although there is as-yet no official Final Crisis series). At the heart of the system is a mechanical and thematic emphasis on the escalation and build-up to a historic conflict, rather than the conventional resolution of a conflict that is the usual focus of wargames. The core ingredients of this two-player system include:

• Playable spaces spread across several ‘Crisis Dimensions’ (four Dimensions of three spaces in each game so far).
• Pivotal spaces in each Dimension that are often crucial to victory and became hotly contested focal points.
• A ‘Crisis Track’ that limits available tokens or cubes, and punishes players for escalating the conflict.
• Hidden objective cards that focus the players’ attention each round, and offer an additional advantage when scored.
• Three regular rounds, during which cards are played either to place or remove cubes or trigger events (a fairly typical CDG mechanism), followed by a fourth ‘Final Crisis’ round in which players are limited to targeting specific spaces using cards they have saved from previous rounds.
• Victory is determined by a tug-of-war victory point track, scored at the end of each round for controlling either objective spaces or whole dimensions (advancing too far on the crisis track can also trigger a victory point penalty).

The combination of the limited token pool and penalties for escalation does a great job of invoking the feeling of a mounting crisis, forcing both players into a game of brinkmanship as they seek to place exactly as many cubes as they think they need to, but no more than are necessary, as if you place too many cubes in one space you risk overcommitting and weakening your flexibility to respond elsewhere. Fort Sumter features only one additional special rule, a ‘Peace Commissioner’ that is typically placed by the player who has contributed less to escalating the crisis (or by event), and prevents either player from adding or removing cubes in one space. The game is otherwise extremely streamlined, taking less than half an hour to play, the ideal length for a ‘lunchtime’ session. 

Fred Serval’s Red Flag Over Paris, released at the end of last year, builds on the basic structure of Fort Sumter while innovating in several new directions. It features:

• The same number of spaces (12) and Crisis Dimensions (4), this time split into two Political Dimensions (Institutions and Public Opinion) and two Military Dimensions (Forts and Paris), with slightly different rules governing the placement and removal of cubes in each dimension.
• An element of (psycho)geographical strategy, governed by lines indicating adjacencies between spaces. While in Fort Sumter it is always possible to place or remove into any space (unless the Peace Commissioner is present), in Red Flag Over Paris you require presence or control of an adjacent space in order to do so.
• A degree of asymmetry, introduced by the division between Political and Military Dimensions, as each pair of dimensions has an associated tug-of-war scoring track, and each player is incentivised to focus more on one than the other (Versailles on Military and Commune on Political).
• This asymmetry is carried over to the Crisis Tracks, and also the new Momentum Tracks, with Versailles having to pursue Prussian Collaboration to unlock additional cubes, while the Commune has to build up their Revolutionary Momentum in order to be able to store any cubes at all.
• The Commune is vulnerable to attack early on in the game, as any removed cubes that cannot fit on their Revolutionary Momentum track are permanently removed from play, while Versailles struggles to get moving fast as many of their cubes are still locked away as Prussian prisoners of war.

The result is a slightly longer and more complex game, but one that offers (I would say) a richer narrative experience, further enhanced by the wider range of event effects and the forced use of events during the Final Crisis round.

The Bell of Treason, designed by Petr Mojžíš and available now on P500, further develops the system in some respects, while also returning to its roots in others:

• It retains the concept of adjacent spaces introduced by Red Flag Over Paris, but reduces these back to a single set of four Dimensions (International, Political, Military, and Public) contributing to a single tug-of-war victory track.
• The Momentum tracks from Red Flag Over Paris are gone, replaced instead with two interlinked systems that release additional cubes for either side: the escalation of Sudeten German Terror attacks push the Czechoslovak population towards Concede, while also provoking the Partial and General Mobilisation of the Czechoslovak Army, bolstering Defend.
• The Final Crisis (now called Final Decision) round is a fusion of Fort Sumter and Red Flag Over Paris, with cards reserved for this round being playable either to target a specific space, for their event effect, or sometimes with no effect if a player has been forced to reserve the wrong card.
• The biggest innovation in The Bell of Treason is how victory is determined, with two possible ways that the game can end. At the beginning of Round 2 and Round 3, if the Defend player is ahead on victory points, there is a chance that Hitler decides to launch a surprise attack – usually a Defend victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one, as the country is forced to fight alone against the sudden invasion.
• Otherwise, Defend can win at the end of the Final Decision round only if they are both ahead on victory points and able to outnumber Concede cubes in the President space from at least one adjacent space (including the President space itself), representing the fact that the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš was extremely reluctant to lead his country into what he saw as an ultimately futile war.

The result of these changes is to encourage both players to focus throughout the game on their preparation for the crucial Final Decision round, during which Czechoslovakia (and perhaps the whole of Europe) stood at the brink of war in September 1938.

All three games make use of just a limited set of additional special rules to convincingly highlight the key aspects of the ‘crisis’ that they model, demonstrating the strength and flexibility of the underlying system. In fact, the Final Crisis system is so compelling that I have not been able to resist adapting it for a prototype of my own, one that focuses on an uprising that occurred almost exactly 50 years after the events depicted by Red Flag Over Paris, and with many echoes of the Paris Commune. For this prototype I am again making use of the idea of distinct Political/Military Dimensions and scoring tracks, but further differentiating these by allowing only early Military victories, with the Political track determining victory if neither player has been able to gain the upper hand on the Military track by the end of the game. This is almost the opposite (or an inversion) of Mark Herman’s original concept for Fort Sumter, in which “there is no Political activity in the final crisis as this dimension has failed”. I am also exploring an alternative approach to the objective cards used in each of the previous games – whereas these objectives offer both a victory point and an additional bonus event if you achieve them, the ‘offensives’ in my prototype instead offer a bonus action first, making it easier to secure a specific space if you have planned well, but with less of a bonus once that space is secure. It is a testament to Mark Herman’s original design that it continues to offer inspiration to a whole generation of new designers (myself included), and I would encourage anyone who has enjoyed one of these games to try out the different experiences offered by the others.

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