Designed by Ted Raicer for GMT
Paths of Glory is a strategic simulation of the First World War, covering all major theatres of operations. It was hotly anticipated, generating a furious correspondence on various websites even before it was published. The first copies appeared in England in early July and the first reviews at about the same time—a feeding frenzy among American cellophane-rippers. Designer Ted Raicer has spent the rest of 1999 on the websites, answering rules questions and fending off criticism. If he has a tendency to stonewall rather than elucidate, many critics kept repeating the same question, only louder (rather like English tourists lost in France): the upshot was a revised rules set issued by GMT, incorporating various amendments and errata.
There is a full review of the game elsewhere in this issue. What follows is a vindictive diatribe (surely, "considered judgement based on extensive playtesting"—Ed).
First, the good news. This is a very exciting game with gut-wrenching decisions every phase, let alone every turn. It is deeply unforgiving: loss of concentration, even for a phase or two, can be fatal. Card driven, like WtP, the interaction between the players and the arrival of various key cards will make it unlikely you will face the exact same situation twice. The cards give you choices: they can activate units for movement or combat; be played as events; or provide combat bonuses, reinforcements, or replacements. If you find yourself reacting to your opponent's moves, you are likely to play useful event cards to activate your units or replace lost armies. This is tantalising stuff. The campaign game I played developed an atmosphere of quiet tension more appropriate to bomb disposal than a 'recreational hobby'.
Critics might argue that the choices presented by the card system are not genuine alternatives. As the Allies I faced such dilemmas as 'do I make another attack with my Russians in the Caucasus, or do I bring on more French replacements'—events that are hardly mutually exclusive. Since I like WtP, which features the same conceptual problem, I will pass over this issue.
My opponent and I thought of PoG as 'chess-like', but checkers ('draughts') might be a better analogy. You know the feeling: your opponent smirks, picks up a counter and leapfrogs hither and thither, wiping out half your 'forces'. PoG has simple but deadly supply rules: units rendered OOS (out-of-supply) can't move or fight from the moment they are cut off. If still OOS at the end of the turn they are eliminated and cannot be replaced. On the Eastern Front the low unit density rarely allows a continuous front to be occupied, leading to what has become known as the 'Dance of Death'.
One side essays a flanking move, often with the nippy 'corps' size units, but sometimes with the larger 'army' counters; the opposition is threatened with encirclement. But rather than withdraw, the other side doubles the stakes with a flanking manoeuvre of its own, threatening to cut off the flanking force. Eventually one side comes unstuck and a large contingent goes into the POW cages.
It is theoretically possible for a similar breakthrough to tear open the western front, with a British corps charging down the Ruhr to cut off the German armies in France; likewise a German corps could pop south from Chateau-Thierry and put half the French army OOS. You don't have to occupy every area behind the victims to make them OOS, just 'control' the area i.e. be the last to move through it. Since the Allies have the last phase of each turn, this gives them a useful edge: the Central Powers cannot react before the dreaded attrition phase.
Ted Raicer's spirited defence of this rule is that an ahistoric melt down on the western front, caused (say) by a single British corps moving down the back of the German line, won't occur because the existence of this possibility will make both sides garrison their front strongly enough to prevent it.
However, it is a very different story in the East. The unit density in the East is lower and there is always a victory point city tantalisingly close. Ted Raicer avers that the 'Dance of Death' is not compulsory—it takes two to Tango. It is a high risk strategy for the lumbering Russians to engage in a battle of manoeuvre with the nimble Huns (as I found out when I lost Poland with three Russian armies in it) but a more cautious approach will not yield opportunities against the equally fragile Austro-Hungarians. There may be some Allied players content to just hold the line in Russia, but Terpsichore will lure the rest of us to a series of swirling clashes that feel much more like World War II.
And then there's the Balkans. In our game, the campaigns in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria—and the Middle East for that matter—were decided by a succession of encirclement battles. I must fess up here: the low unit density was partially the responsibility of both players; we would rather spend our last card on another activation than yield the initiative by bringing on replacements. Jockeying for position, sudden lunges, and desperate relief efforts to save key units stranded OOS.
Crucial to the eventual Allied success was a 5-phase operation to relieve the French Army of Salonika, which had recaptured Belgrade but got cut off by an Austrian corps sneaking through the mountains behind it. (The Italians saved the day, just as the Austrians had pulled Germany's fat out of the fire when I encircled three German armies in western Russia.)
The flank attack rule helps keep things fluid, even when both sides try to maintain a coherent front. If you can attack from more than one area a flank attack can allow you to 'shoot first' in the ensuing battle; this is subject to a die roll and if the attacker fails, the defender enjoys the advantage instead. This cannot be done against dug-in troops, but for reasons I'll come to, you won't find many of them on the Eastern Front.
Two aspects did replicate World War I rather well. Units move or fight. You can concentrate your forces for an attack, but the enemy has the next phase to beef up the defences of the target area(s). The chance of breaking through is very difficult to predict—none of that '3:1 attack = 33% chance of breakthrough' stuff here: in order to advance after combat you must have an intact unit. But casualties might transform a damaged army into an intact corps, able to move forward if the defenders are ousted. Conversely, the attacker's might have good odds, and even wipe out the opposition, but without an intact unit to advance the frontline remains where it is.
Armies cannot entrench themselves automatically. Activated forces dice to dig in once the entrench card has been played, a second stage of digging in is also subject to a die roll. Better quality troops are quicker with the shovels: British and Germans succeed on a 1-4, French on a 1-3, Russians and Austrians on a 1-2. The Habsburg who wants to assure himself the Carpathians are Russian-proof is wise to import some Germans to do the spade work. This seemed odd, but did produce the historical result that the German lines in the West were much stronger than those of the British and French (all level 2 by late 1916, while the French and British positions were mostly level 1 trenches, with some areas still unentrenched at the end of the game in 1919). No Allied forces dug in apart from those on the Western Front.
The treatment of Italy is odd. The Italian armies enter the game in a parlous state (having already taken a step loss) exacerbated by the fact that all northern Italian areas are 'open', the adjacent Austrian ones are mountains. The hills are alive with the sound of Habsburgs. Ted Raicer has justified the former by pointing to the chaos attending the Italian mobilisation, desperate shortages of everything but the enemy: their army was unprepared for war. I forget the explanation for the geographical treatment, but the consequences of weak units and premature erosion of the Italian Alps are enormous.
The Allies must keep the Central Powers, especially the Austro-Hungarians, very busy in Russia and the Balkans or risk seeing their new belligerent nation trounced the moment it enters the war. North Italy is packed with victory point cities, so the Central Powers look down from their mountain squares like a slavering vulture ready to pounce. Historically, Italy butted its collective head against the Austrian frontlines in a succession of offensives that cost hundreds of thousands of casualties and got nowhere. They won't try that in PoG. The DS solution seems to be to bring Italy into the war only when the Central Powers are hotly engaged elsewhere, and have British or French armies massed on the border, ready to take over key areas of the frontline. This did happen historically, but only after two years of fighting and the German offensive in autumn 1917.
Other quibbles include the exposure of the Austro-Hungarian 3rd Army to immediate defeat in Summer 1914 and the Bulgarian army enjoying higher combat ratings than the Turks. If I play this much more, I think I'll change the Turkish counters to reflect that they (like the pre-war BEF) had a core of very tough divisions from Anatolia and a lot of, well, Iraqis. The Anatolian units were irreplaceable (many villages were depopulated after the war) like the BEF, which gets a special and irreplaceable counter in the game.
My biggest gripe is playing time: it worked out at nearly an hour a turn. We took five evenings (one a week) to play the full campaign game, which is too much to devote to a single game. This is a big investment in time and ties up the use of a spare room for too long. If the game were shorter, we'd play it more often. And I'd like to, because it is without doubt the best published game on my favourite subject.
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© Copyright 2000 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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