Above the Trenches: Game Length

Hindsight is always a problem in history-themed games. It’s fun to refight the Battle of Midway, but the Japanese player is never truly going to be surprised by the presence of the American carriers. And while we know that World War I ended in November of 1918, the actual participants didn’t.

There are a couple of facets of the design that I have in mind for Above the Trenches that are going to compound that hindsight problem.

First, this is going to be a points game. Whoever has the most points wins. So if you know the game is about to end, you’re incentivized to not worry about preservation of resources, you just throw everything in to squeeze out every last point. But when the war’s coming to an end, most of the participants ease up rather than going gonzo. No one wants to be the last casualty.

Second, one of the decisions that players should have to make is the classic quantity-versus-quality issue. When do you interrupt your production lines to switch over to a new model aircraft? The historical decision-makers couldn’t know the remaining duration of the war and use that information to optimize their production decisions. The game players should be in the same amount of darkness.

Now for gameplay reasons the game length can’t be entirely random. It wouldn’t be very satisfying if the game ended on turn 2, nor should the game last until the 1930s. So simple mechanics like “at the end of the turn, roll a die and on a 6 the game is over” won’t work well.

I envision a collection of Event chits of three different types, one drawn randomly at the beginning of each turn, and the effects depending on how many of each type has been drawn:

• Allied Blockade (3 chits): The Germans progressively lose production, the exact effects awaiting development of the production system.

• U-Boats (4 chits): The first chit initiates unrestricted submarine warfare, causing the British to lose some production. The second results in the Allies instituting convoys, negating the previous result. The third chit brings the US into the war; though the US air force doesn’t start showing up to the front until a year later. The fourth chit has no additional effect.

• German Offensive in Russia (4 chits): The first two and the fourth chits have no effect. The 3rd chit indicates that Russia has surrendered; with the collapse of the eastern front, the next turn sees the Kaiserschlact, the final German offensive in the west. Two turns after that, with the Allies on the final offensive, the game ends.

It might seem strange to have events with no effect, but those chits are needed to make the probabilities work out correctly.

Remember that the game starts with the German offensive at Verdun (February 1916) and uses quarterly turns. So historically the US declares war on turn 5 (Feb-Apr 1917), the Kaiserschlacht occurs on turn 9 (Feb-Apr 1918), and the game ends on turn 11 (Aug-Oct 1918). I realize that I cheat a bit there by ignoring the final eleven days of the war. But that’s such a small fraction of a turn that I don’t feel too guilty about it.

If the first three events are those German Offensives, the Kaiserschlacht happens on turn 4 and the game ends on turn 6. Since turns represent three months starting in February 1916, that has the war ending on the May-Jul 1917 turn. That’s pretty early, but this should be a rare occurrence, only about a .1% chance by my calculations.

Conversely, if the third German Offensive chit isn’t drawn until turn 10 – also unlikely though possible – the game lasts until turn 12 (Feb-Apr 1919). Which doesn’t seem unreasonable.

And of course the most common cases should fall between these two extremes.

Computer simulations show the above system has the US entering on Turn 5 or Turn 6 on average, which is about right.

I think the above gives a sense of the war’s progress in that the war’s end won’t come completely out of the blue, but results in a spread of reasonably plausible results which make min-maxing production decisions a bit harder.

All of the above was in my original prototype and was one of the aspects I was okay with. But an obvious addition going forward is to make the results of the air war in the offensives have an effect on the final turns. Perhaps with enough effort and a bit of luck the Kaiserschlact actually succeeds and the war ends on that turn, or the Allies knock out the Germans in one turn rather than two. The details of that will have to await the working out of the air-ground war.