Having a Great Time Playing the Great War

Part of what we do here at NDNG is to bring excitement into our hobby and reach out to the community to get them to enjoy all the great games we play. Part of this is holding demo games whenever possible and I recently had the opportunity to hold a demo of the new Great War book at in Ashburn Va.

Holding a demo at this store seems fitting, my first taste of was playing FOW-1918 at a convention hosted by the owner of Huzzah Chris Huhn almost ten years ago. I asked Chris, who is a huge Great War fan if I can hold a demo at his store and he quickly found me some space at his store.

We had a great turnout; I was joined by NDNG’s “Triple-G” Glenn Goddard, Jason “Red-One” Huffstetler, and six others to check out the game. My plan was to have the players all play a game together, each controlling a part of a force while I ran the game. Some folks just wanted to watch and when we started, we had three German and three French players to face off against one another.

The Mission and Forces

I wanted to use my trench set so I picked the Big Push mission however I had other reasons for picking this mission. In the Great War book, you have four unique missions that incorporate some rules that really gives you the flavor of the period. Rules such as Cratered Ground, Preliminary Bombardment and Overwhelming Force really impacts the game and makes it play so much differently than Flames of War or Team Yankee.

For the forces, I wanted to use some of the new lists in the book and make the game playable in less than 2.5 hours, so I settled at two 100-point lists.

The Germans used the Siegfriedstellung formation. Many folks still can’t get their heads around how this formation and will play, however, the players assembled at the table quickly saw its worth during the demo.

The force has its basic infantry platoon augmented with an anti-tank rifle team rifle-grenade team and Granatenwerfer, which gave them fifteen stands to man the front line along with the mandatory and 7.7cm gun. The force’s four HMGs which were put into nests. Additionally, two Minenwerfers and a 3.7cm antitank gun completed the German force.

I altered the mission a bit and changed the Trench Reserves to delayed and gave this force a Stoss platoon as a counterattack force. All of this firepower wills it in trenches, nests and gun pits behind a line of barbed wire that went across the entire table.

The French force consisted of three Tirailleur platoons with two of them having a flamethrower team and three platoons of tanks. One Schneider, one St Chamond, and a platoon of two FT-17 tanks. This gave each player an infantry platoon with tank support. This would not be a list I would use myself for this mission. I wouldn’t have taken so many tanks and I would have taken HMGs to pin the enemy and some 58mm mortars to knock out those nests and gun pits.

The Game

The French players did what players often do and split the table into three sectors and headed off to attack. I think they saw the mistake of this when the Germans used their HMGs which were also spread out along the front line to put the three French groups under a blistering fire that whittled down their forces well before they got to the barbed wire obstacle.

My advice would be to pick a weak point in the German line and place two infantry platoons against it while the third hits the other flank to keep the German’s honest.

The German players also had to learn how the Great War game plays differently from the first turn when they wanted to bombard with their mortars. Despite this, they showed how the machine gun rules no-mans land. The French units had to stop and take advantage of the Cratered Ground special rule until they could become un-pinned and wait for their tanks, which got knocked out early to return to the table using the Overwhelming Force special rule.

Despite this beating, one French force lead by Jason removed the wire and reached a section of the German trench where they assaulted and cleared out part of the German forces manning them. After two turns of assaulting they were on the objective and the Siegfriedstellung troops were into shape to push them back. However, riding to the rescue was the Stoss platoon to wipe out the now weakened French force. Despite the heavy French losses, it was a near run thing and all of the players left the table becoming fans of the new Great War book.

Thoughts
Well many of you know I am very biased here but I love the new book and I love playing this period. While Flames of War, Team Yankee, and Fate of a Nation all play similarly, Great War is a much different game much like how ‘Nam. While the basic rules are the new universal rules for all five games, the units and Great War unique rules really leaves you with a much different experience.

I hope this game attracts its own player base who not only are interested in the Great War but also learning and mastering this game.