Wherein you can read of some of the more recent offerings from the Captive Audience Crowd.
Back in the old days, the Penn State Wargaming Club had one really annoying member. Let's call him Todd. Todd especially liked strategic World War II games, and, despite his lack of familiarity with running water, he always managed to weasel his way into a 3 player game of Third Reich or World in Flames.
Aside from interpersonal skills that would upset St. Francis d'Assisi, Todd had an especially disturbing habit: he announced his weird and convoluted strategies ahead of time, usually in a shrill and whiny voice. For example, during a game of WIF, he loudly announced his intention to launch a paratrooper operation into a given hex, in conjunction with an amphibious landing, and, if the turn ended ... and the next turn was mud ... and if he moved first and was able to roll 4 consecutive "6"s on the die, then "every British unit in the Med would be out of supply and unable to recover". Of course, he rolled 4 consecutive "1"s and "2"s, cursed the dice and quit the game. I can't help but think that Todd would love Tomorrow tbe World.
TTW is, in most respects, a frightening game. Just look at the rules cover, which features a blown up pixel-graphic of the by-now famous XTR skull and crossbones counter art. Another scary moment occurs upon viewing the map, which features many oddly shaded regions and a rather dense configuration of interconnected dots. The map depicts the entire world, with wrap-around east-west movement in the Pacific. The counters are standard XTR fare, thanks to Beth Queman, who now seems to make counters for just about everybody.
Here's the situation assumed by TTW: The Germans and Japanese won WW2 fairly early on, and proceeded to conquer the whole globe by 1948. The game has them squaring off against each other in a climactic struggle for global dominance. I've always thought that the point of an "alternate history" game is to provide something fun and interesting (and replayable) that deviates from the standard wargaming fare. I've never held them up to any son of could-this-really-have-happened standard, and I should point out that one of my favorite games is XTR's Mississippi Banzai, a game that was based upon a "classic" playtest match of the first (3W) edition of TTW (this is the second version thereof).
For those who care about this sort of thing, the situation presented is nearly totally absurd. The game starts with the globe divided up right down the middle, Japan in the west, Germany in the east, in a style reminiscent of the 15th century, wherein the Pope gave the New World mines to Spain, and Portugal got the shaft. There is no way a successful invasion of the United States could be carried out by Germany or Japan. So much for "willing suspension of disbelief." But that is besides the point, for me anyway.
Long Rules
The rules are rather long for an a-historical game, and the naval ones are sloppy, especially by XTR's standards, which I find usually to be very tight. The major clarification needed is that naval movement, which is governed by a grid of areas, must stop upon entering an enemy occupied area. Land movement is governed by dots and the communication lines between them. The dots have numbers which dictate stacking in terms of numbers of units. All combat is simultaneous firing, as many rounds as needed, and takes place within dots or areas. Each turn is 3 months, each unit is an army. Combat is simple d10 firing, roll lower or equal to your attack or defense value and score a hit. Hits flip units to a reduced strength or kill reduced units. Japanese and German units (not minor allies) can be rebuilt by a production system.
The navies of both sides are small in terms of units, with the Japanese having a marked superiority. The Japanese also have tons of infantry, while the numerically inferior Germans are of a higher and more mobile quality (tanks). Each side has an equal number of marginally effective medium and light aircraft, but no heavy or strategic bombing, as the war ended in '43 before full strategic development. The Germans have more and better subs. Players choose sides and roll a die to see who starts the war. The winner can set up second and move first. This makes the game more replayable; the free setup and random selection of strategic attacker prevents any stale opening moves or arcane analysis.
The game has industrial and oil producdon. Japanese industry is concentrated on the home island while Germany's is more spread out, including an American colony in the northeast. Each side has 5 oil wells (but none in South America?). Loss of oil wells or industrial dots hurts your production, which is very high at start. There is no strategic movement, so as losses mount and units are rebuilt at the home country, they must be shuttled out by sea transport. Overland movement is limited to your movement allowance, although friendly industrial centers cost 0 MP's. There are different terrain type dots, clear, rough, desert, mountain, monsoon, etc., each with their own terrain costs and seasonal effects. The terrain key for some reason doesn't summarize combat effects, so you have to refer to the rules for those.
The game has three central mechanics. One is that you can choose to have your combat phase before or after movement. Second, you can intercept enemy movement when it is adjacent to you but not screened by other enemy units. Third, you can launch mobile assaults and/or naval "sweeps."
Combining those three ingredients makes for mind-numbingly unpredictable turns. There is a lot of combat, a lot of dying, a lot of intercepting, and a lot of rebuilding. The game features breakneck blitzkrieging action, huge deadpiles, and continental sized offensives and collapses. The supply rules are fairly stringent, and, since the turns are seasonal, a lack of supply is very deadly, eliminating all starving units at the end of a friendly turn. Enter The Todd Effect, stage left.
In my 2.5 playtest games, I found myself trying to out-un-supply the other guy, to the nearly complete distraction of any overall grand strategy -- a sort of "how can I screw him this turn" opportunism emerged. Anyway, land units can almost always be rebuilt immediately, but navies take longer to rebuild -- critical naval losses can really throw the game early, so be careful out there. Operationally speaking, the game seemed to be a wash, with my monstrously cool pile of guys dicing it out with your equally monstrous guys.
Eventually, attrition gives way to collapse and a continent falls. Proper arrangement of these monumental events is the key to the game, and is quite fun, although rather mindless in a way. You can win by taking all the oil, or all the other guy's industrial dots. Either way, the game is very long, and could conceivably go on forever. The short game is won on industrial points after 5-10 turns, and is decidedly less interesting. The naval game is tough to get a grip on too; we generally kept very large naval stacks and had only Colossal Naval Battles of Great Dice.
There are optional rules for United Nation's sponsored rebellions and of course nukes, but they seemed rather uninteresting, and so we skipped them. The rebellions might add spice to the game, but the nukes were a rules nightmare, presenting special cases to almost every critical rule paragraph, and, besides, their lethality makes this rather silly and almost pointless game even more so.
Other quibbles: the dots are too close together and make for horrendous crowding at times. Also, while they regulate stacking and adjacency issues fine, they don't work for distance. In fact, more dots appear where there are more cities, and so smaller distances take longer to traverse than longer distances, which have less dots. Area movement games have this problem too, so I suppose its not such a big deal.
Despite all of the above, the child in me kinda liked TTW and I give it ar overall mild thumbs up, although not nearly as enthusiastically as I would for Mississippi Banzai or Tiger of Ethiopia, which are much better. So is NATO, Nukes and Nazis, for that matter. TTW gives you a global we-dice-em-up, a fantasyland Axis and Allies, I suppose, and a game that is created for the truly competitive at heart. The fluid game system allows for a bazillion combinations of harebrained maneuvering. You can conquer the whole globe either by direct assault or by guile; it's a gloater's dream come true. The game is not for everyone, obviously, but those of you who like any sort of alternate history will find it as least as fun as any of the others and it is probably the best global wargame I've played. TTW seems to me to be a spiritual cousin of the old Yaquinto game Ultimatum if I recall correctly, the laner game had no victory conditions. Perhaps TTW should be played that way; that would, at least, minimize the Todd factor. What ever, it's good, brain-dead fun.
Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #28 Table of Contents
Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1998 by Richard Berg
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com