What we think of Al Nofi’s The Great War | A Night at “Casus Belli”Club
Yesterday, as every Tuesday, I met my friends at “Casus Belli”, the wargaming club where we usually hold our sessions of gaming and reunions. One our group, Paolo, proposed us to play a classic wargame called “Albert Nofi’s -The Great War” in a re-designed version from One Small Step Games. I’m not a great lover of WWI games, except for Paths of Glory (Gmt Games), one of the most important card-driven in wargaming history. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try. It wasn’t a good idea. Let’s see why!
The counters
Paolo unpunched the counters and sorted them following the colours. The problem was that the colours were so bad that we couldn’t help him a lot in organizing the counters. Some of them were similar; other were totally different from the usual colour palette used in almost every wargame. Have you ever seen a Red Italian counter? Or a White Great Britain counter? The other problem was the nationalities’ abbreviations. GR for Germans? GK for Greeks? And last but not least: Turkey (in grey and pink) instead of Ottoman Empire? What the hell, I say!
So, why decide to put Turkey during WWI, when Turkey was a consequence of the Ottoman Empire’s fall?
Don’t know the reasons and I’m not sure I want to know them.
The map
Do you remember the old Avalon Hill’s Civilization map? Yes the one with areas and segments everywhere!
Cool, now let’s look the awful work done to create areas in The Great War and let’s check, just for fun, similiarities.
This one is simply one of the worst maps I’ve ever seen. I can tollerate the old work done at Avalon Hill studios decades ago for the classic Civilization, but this 2016 map it’s simply unacceptable. What is this map doing? Is it proned? Is it anemic? And this was also a restyle of the old one! Go home map, you’re drunk.
The Game
Once we finshed the setup of a 5 months scenario (there are several scenarios included but also a complete campaign), we chose nationalities and began the game. Paolo and Antonio played the Central Powers. Me, Mauro and Roberto played the Allies. The unit were pretty simple on the counters: Armies, Corps and Naval Units. They had no reduced values on the back but an entrenched status. The only units with a reduced side were the Naval Units which had to absorb damage in some cases. The ground combat was pretty simple: resolved with odds and a D6 roll on a table. The results were really strange and sometimes frustrating. Imagine to attack with a odd of 4:1 in your favour and receive the same amount of damage than the enemy on a roll of 3 on 6. Not so realistic and rewarding. The last strange feature I want to talk about, is the damage, which is not applied directly on the ground units involved in the combat but on a resource track, reducing the resources amount according to the loss number. Attacking in this game affect mainly this pool of resource points which are used to deploy new units on the field, to absorb damage and to execute some actions during your turn. These points are also worth Victory Points at the end of the game to gain a Marginal victory with your faction. Once a nations runs out of these points it must lose units on the field and soon be defeated. Although it’s an interesting way of managing the war, it’s surely not a thing I want to find in a wargame. Resources can be an additional feature for Supply and Strategic Redeployment, but not the core of the entire game. Sure, that’s only my taste and my opinion but we shared this idea at the table, along with other problems we encountered.
The rules were terribly unclear and the tables sometimes vague. There were no counters to track the Turn, the Year and the Control counters to mark conquered spaces.
Our faces speak for us. Hope you’ll appreciate this game more than we did, cause it left us only a sense of delusion considering the great expectations some of us had.