Ted Raicer has been carrying the World War One banner to date, his recent announcement of his retirement from game design does not leave us without a Fahnenjunker because alongside Dave Bolt's mega-detailed but computer-looping Home Before The Wimbles Fall is Dave Schroeder's much simpler (but not simplistic) The Schlieffen Plan. This is the first game in a World War I and II system called Der Weltkrieg. Coming up soon are Tannenburg, Galicia and Serbia to extend the action into the east. In appearance and scale The Schlieffen Plan is very similar to Joe Miranda's Reinforce The Right. It is a solid player's game, lots of combat calculations, divisional level with strength point losses but it is not a stupid system and I have been impressed with it. It will be a long game (well more than one session anyway).
The first thing to strike you is an odd crystalline appearance to the map. Instead of filling a hex with one terrain type the hexes use a single terrain type on each hex-edge and the result can be a pizza carved into slices. Any oddness is swiftly lost in action and it works cleanly.
Indeed for a lot-of-units-lot-of-fighting game The Schlieffen Plan is very clean indeed. Short rules, clear concepts all help. The clear map is seconded with neat counters. They have basic colours (Cobalt Blue or the BEF, Light Blue for les biffins, black for the SS Belgians, Grey for the Germans, and White for the kaiserlik siege guns) with NATO symbol block colours to show (for example) Colonial French units or Indian Corps formations.
Combat is very simple but very clever being very intimately linked to supply. Von Kluck's 1st Army starts with 99 supply points, on the attack a German supply point will supply 8 SPs of attacker (an active division) so he can count on 8 attacks with his entire battle-line without the need for further supply. This is not enough, and he is going to need fresh supplies to keep his offensive moving, because an unsupplied unit is halved in combat value.
Having chosen to spend his supply points (let's say three active divisions are attacking a French active division) his twenty-four points (eight per active German division) entitle him to a die-roll on the 24 column (no more, no less, no odds) terrain adjusts the dice, and the loss range on an unadjusted die is two to five, with a 3.5 average - a 14.5% loss rate. The defender has a choice to make before the dice is thrown though. If he elects to retreat one hex after the results his losses can be reduced by one third, making the loss rate 9.7%.
Let's say our brave Frenchie elects to hold his ground, he can treble his combat value in response, if choosing to retreat after the combat he merely doubles it! But he pays for supply at the rate of one supply point per three combat points (double the attacking rate), so he pays two supply points (against the German three). Of course if he does not supply his counter-attack and retreats he is halved and then doubled, but this is the stuff of retreats not fifteen rounds a minute. The trebled French counterattack inflicts an average of 2.7 combat points, and doubled 1.7 (giving loss rates inflicted of 45% and 28%). So the attackers do inflict more losses in this example, but at a fearsome loss to their and their enemy's supplies. As the ammo vanishes retreating and limitation of supply usage become the necessary skill for the Entente Player, and when Gallieni approaches he is unlikely to find von Kluck ready on the defence.
I am not sure I can rationalise the extra cost of defence supply, unless the designer is saying that the Mons style of battle requires a lot of defender resources to inflict the killing rates. After all an unsupplied French unit refusing to retreat would still inflict an loss rate of 13.8% (much the same as the supplied attacker). I invite you to guess the effect of the enforced turn of Plan 17 which the rules require on First to Fourth Armies - it is a terrible slaughter.
Fortress
The fortress rules are not quite as simple (they use the same basic CRT) and show evidence of having been changed dramatically at the last moment to make Liege and Namur fall at something like the historical rate. There are a lot of special factors here under the errata (provided with the game), and pure artillery attacks cannot be counter-attacked by non-artillery, so your guns can play upon the enciente in perfect safety. Fortresses are non-moving units of great strength (although there is a great range of strengths). The fortresses are not marked on the maps which must serve the Second World War as well. Instead you get counters.
The terrain can have dramatic effects on combat (it reduces the dice score of the attacker and increases that of the counter-attack), and I can easily imagine the slaughter when the Italians cross the Izonzo into the Julian Alps. So at last we have a World War I game where attacking really is a bloody game, something a number of games have missed recently. This works well, but it does mean that unless forced to it neither side is going to attack on the German frontier fronts (Metz down to the Rhein), because they are not going anywhere if they do so attack, and units and supplies can be better used on the open flank. This is not the way it was, but then few games deal with this properly, so The Schlieffen Plan has no need to be ashamed, even if it is an opportunity missed. The sort of command control that (say) Home Before The Leaves Fall gives to introduce the characteristics of the commanders is beyond The Schlieffen Plan's remit. Similarly the sort of politically driven system that Joe Miranda might use (or the little WWI folio generate) is also not in evidence. The Schlieffen Plan does interfere with your play as a commander but not unduly and certainly not as much as it should historically. This will be bewailed by 10% of its players and welcomed by 50%. The essence of The Schlieffen Plan is playability and here it rivals Reinforce The Right particularly.
Recent games have come up with exciting sequences of play, but The Schlieffen Plan has no need for this. Reinforcements arrive, you move and you fight. HQs are important because they carry the supply-points needed for full strength attacks and defences. Their positioning it vital to strategy, and they can supply any units of their own side (there is no real attachment to particular HQs).
Railways are handled conventionally with lots of little conversion units moving down a too-complex railway net. There are limits in size of units (or number of supply points) that can be carried. My impression was that the railways could be converted to supply the First Army wing too quickly, however, they will usually want to have cleared the major fortresses before the slow engineers move through the area.
Stacking is a real problem early on, with divisional units and not especially large hexes one is often knocking them stacks over. However, combat at the rates already quoted is going to take a lot of the sting out of these stacks.
Scenario Special Rules
The scenario special rules include an enforced Plan 17 over two turns (eight days) by First to Fourth French Armies. Units adjacent to German units must make attacks. In addition the rules provide for a very clever mobilisation sub-routine. In each of the first five turns the numbers and types of units capable of free movement is historically reduced. So Landwehr brigades are not going to be ready until Turn five, but key German active corps will be in action on Turn One. British units do not activate until Turn Four and the move only half distance. The effect is of key units moving off to commence (for example) the invasion of Luxembourg or the siege of Liege. It gives a real feel of the machine massing, forming and advancing.
So The Schlieffen Plan has a lot going for it. It is not historically foolish (the mobilisation rules and the CRT for example) nor is it unnecessarily complex (the clean and bloody CRT) but it also does not deny the gamers what they so much enjoy, good positional play. The concept of combat as being driven by political (both military and democratic) politics is not really present. The French army is not (apart from four days) consumed with the desire to free Alsace Lorraine. Rather it is already sidling northwards into the path of the Wheeling Prussians. The German army is not led by the Crown Princes with a desire to slot it to the French rather than withdrawing to encourage them in their deluded ways. The British seem to hold defensively in a way that eluded Sir John French.
But such is the stuff of gaming, do you want your history Heavy or Light, because unlike Goldilocks you are unlikely to get it Just Right. My other main concern which would only be dispelled by frequent play is whether the historical speed of advance can be achieved. In my initial games the Germans seemed to be slowing too much, but they may have spent too long before Liege and Namur. The need for a lot of clarifications to deal with fortress attacks suggests a substantial weakness here. Only time and play will tell, and I imagine The Schlieffen Plan will get both.
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© Copyright 1998 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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