Stake the Bunny,
Open the Box

1914: Opening Moves

Reviewed by Charles Vasey

Gary Graber for Minden Games

This is a solitaire mini-game lifted from Panzerschreck magazine that covers the army level combat of the first thirty days of 1914 in France and Belgium. As such it is both ingenious and ephemeral, but it does rather point at how much clutter we throw into a game to simulate a topic while at the same time clouding the key issues.

The game allows you (as German player) to decide where you place your armies on your border and (most importantly) on the East Front. The East front is ingeniously handled by a multi-turn system which tracks your success in terms of Victory Points and troops returned from or required by the East Front.

German units move (and fight) individually – with the exception of using an artillery marker to give some oomph. The CRT is 1-4 Attacker Retreat and 5-6 Defender Retreat. Since attacking consists of entering an enemy hex an AR result simply returns you to your front-line hex. There are plenty of modifiers. Rough terrain, trenches, certain fortresses, being a Reserve attacking formation and being a British defender help the defender. Skoda attacks on forts, artillery support, attacking Belgians and the Marne Counteroffensive help the attacker. There is no possibility of combing (other than with the artillery counter) but you can attack in succession in certain situations which increases the chances of a push back. The artillery is very important but it slows down the unit with which it moves (one hex rather than two) and has a slight hint of being a fix to get the Germans moving against that CRT.

Allied retreats and movement are handled by the system. These are clever although I could not always find an answer to every situation (except a standard “try to work it out or dice”). The French have two stances: Plan XVII (they attack forward with four armies) and defensive stance (they retire towards Paris). Each hex has a retreat route marked on it to systematise this. So that if you can slip German armies behind the French line this dislocates the system. The 5th Army avoids Plan XVII and tries to cover the flank. The BEF land and moved into Flanders and will thenceforth try to cover the left of the French line. Armies can extend over more than one hex but cannot stack. If any of the hexes Paris to Verdun are German occupied the French will launch Marne counter-attacks (with a +1 drm). There are some optional rules and a Variation table (rather akin to that in 1914).

The result can be an interestingly simple unravelling of the Schlieffen Plan. The Germans will need to try to smash Liege up with the Skodas and push an army through to chase the Belgians back to Antwerpen. This will allow them to push into the plains of Flanders (two hexes a turn) against the forming BEF (and maybe get a step ahead of it). Other German armies in the first turn will be slowed down by the Ardennes (one hex a turn in Rough). If Liege holds then everything unravels. Once in Antwerpen the Belgians will not attack (so no need for Landwehr counters). There is a lot of fiddling about in Alsace and Lorraine but the real action is in the north. If the German can get between the French and Paris he can dislocate movement but will suffer the Marne counter-attacks. He is pretty much encouraged to feed round into Paris and the Alfred ordered.

I doubt this game will be analysed seriously by many reviewers but it probably contains many baleful truths about the campaign that we prefer to cover in many hours of Drive on Paris. It does however reduce them to a few rolls and this can be rather annoying when they go west on you (he said with feeling). The game is not (it must be admitted) going to exercise you for long, but it is well worth playing a half dozen times if you enjoy World War One.

Open the Box, Stake the Bunny

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© Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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