I must admit that I was somewhat surprised to realize that I was going to have my name appear in the MaritaMerkur game credits, and as co- designer no less! I started work at GDW in April of 1979; it was planned that I would be a "gopher" during the hectic pre-Origins months, assuming my developer's job after Origins. One of the first tasks I got was to sort through the mass of material that GDW had collected on the various orders of battle for Marka-Merkur. One thing led to another, and I worked almost exclusively on MM in the following months, becoming the developer and finally co-designer (with R ich Banner).

Marita-Merkur was not an easy project. The design philosophy for the game was that it should be a game, playable in its own right. There was a considerable amount of doubt that this approach was correct, due to the overwhelming superiority of the German forces. When it became apparent that the Italo-Greek War could be represented at the Europa level with only minor problems, the major difficulty of AIM was solved. By coupling the Italo-Greek conflict with the German invasion, the game gave each player a considerable amount of action.

Even at that, there remained another problem area - the hindsight ability. Knowing the actual ability of the Germans, the Allied player's most rational plan would be to evacuate the mainland as soon as possible, sending the British directly from Alexandria to Crete and pulling the Greek Army off the mainland. However, allowing the players to do this would make the game a failure as a simulation, for this was an event inconceivable to the actual participants. Since the guiding idea behind the individual Europa games is that the operational aspects of a campaign are the subject, not the political or grand strategic factors, it was with only a few qualms that we built in the myriad poIitical/strategic factors of the campaign. If there is any truth in the concept of role-playing in boardgames, then players should view themselves as army commanders trying to execute their assigned tasks to the best of their abilities, rather than as the politicians and planners responsible for them being there in the first place.

With that out of the way, there remained "only" completing the game systems to cover the aspects of the campaigns and testing them to insure that they worked correctly. This "only" turned out to be an "ONLY". What, for example, should be done with the naval forces? The problem was not in naval combat, as a system handling that aspect exists. It was in the fact that neither the British nor Italian Navies treated Greece as a separate area in their overall Mediterranean operations.

With the time span covered by the game, it quickly became apparent to us that it was impossible to artificially isolate the Aegean operations without losing any real meaning they represented. Thus, the entire naval aspect was abstracted.

Looking back now that MM has been published, I have a few second thoughts. One is a definite erraturn for the game: German units may use primary transportation lines on the east adge of the map as supply sources, in addition to the other sources. This one passed us by in development probably because we usually tested the game with the MM maps connected to the other Europa maps; the Bulgarian rail net connects to the main Axis rails on Map 3A. The other two thoughts are things I would have done differently; players may use these as unofficial changes to MM.

The first is that I would remove Rule 25-E (increased bomb load) in its entirety. I feel that it can have a far greater effect on the game than it should.

The second change I would make is to slightly modify the Jugoslav supply system. Instead of tracing supply to any one supply city, the Jugoslavs must trace supply to any two cities. If supply can be traced to only one city, then those units are unsupplied. Jugoslav collapse occurs as normal. The reason for this change is to lessen the impact of the Jugoslav mountain "fortress" at Sarajevo. As stands, Sarajevo assumes a somewhat too prominent position in the campaign.

I hope the preceding has given some insight into the development of MaritaMerkur, showing some (but nowhere near all) of the important moments and decisions in the growth of the game. The following sections present various items that have been generated for use with Marita-Merkur.