Public Service Announcement (for Australia/New Zealend readers): GMT P500 direct shipping

  

The most recent P500 delivery received directly from China included Hubris
(unboxing post forthcoming) and Combat Commander: Minor Nations
(which was probably unnecessary., but looks cool.  

I'm just going to come out and say it. Many of my favourite wargame publishers are US-based, and shipping to Australia (and New Zealand, and South Asia/Oceania generally), has hiked over the last six or so years. The rise began before the Pandemic, with the Extraordinary Congress of the Universal Postal Union in 2019, where decisions were made to . That's when USPS postage to Australia for a four-pound game from Noble Knight jumped from around US24.00* to around US$35.00 (it's now upwards of US$50.00). I'm not going to get into the tall grass about that - you can get the gist of it here.**

Tariff uncertainty hasn't helped. From the Australia point of view, neither has the parlous state of the AUD, which, as time of writing has crept up to a lofty US66c. This isn't a uniquely Australian problem, but it's my problem. Every extra dollar spent on postage is a dollar not going to a publisher for their fine wares.

If you read my last post about my wargame collection breakdown, you may remember GMT games made up the single biggest slice of that collection. Part of the reason is they've always been fair and reasonable with international shipping (sometimes more so than was good for them). With the double whammy of higher shipping charges and higher overseas production costs. I thought I'd have to start getting very selective about which P500 orders I was going to keep and which I was going to drop (I'm not going to say here how many titles I have on pre-order, but I'm grateful the production queue stretches out for several years). Around the middle of the year, Gene Billingsley mentioned in GMT's house newsletter that shipping prices would be going up for everyone (and a month or two later, that games delivered from the warehouse would attract a tariff stipend), but in the same breath, he talked about the work they'd been doing to get games ordered from non-US markets shipped directly from the country of manufacture (i.e., China), which meant they would not attract any tariff penalties..

Fast forward to now. I've had a couple of Australia Direct deliveries, now (with Italy '43 (GMT Games, 2025) and a couple of other titles on their way), so I feel like I can make a progress report. As I understand it, the direct shipping is firmly established for Australia/New Zealand and Japan. Products are sent by ship to the distributors, then last leg shipping is by that country's national mail provider. For Australia this is VR Distribution (a division of Asmodee Australia); VR covers New Zealand distribution as well. The shipping prices (available on the GMT website here; scroll down for the International Shipping Table), aren't super-cheap, but they ae significantly better than shipping from the warehouse, They area little more expensive for NZ shipments (about US$5.00 per shipment).

It's early days, but I can report that - for this punter at least - shipments seem to be taking about eight weeks, give or take a few working days, from GMT's shipping notification email to the parcel arriving at my door. I'm in the catbird seat because VR Distribution is based in Adelaide, about three kilometres from where I live, so that's going to shave an extra couple of days transit-time. I'd guess another week or so for our cousins across the ditch. 

To be fair, three deliveries are probably not a significant sample size for any kind of serious consideration, but it does bode well. With Christmas complications, I don't expect to see Italy '43 and it's companions before the middle of January, but hope springs eternal. And it isn't like I'm scratching for a game to learn.

* These aren't hard numbers, but looking over old receipts, they're pretty close.

** And while you're there, donate a couple of bucks to the Wikipedia Foundation. It's an extraordinary tool (celebrating its 25th birthday) and an exemplar of how the Internet can work for a common good.

 

 

By the Numbers: Revised collection breakdown (2025)

  

 

That Dyer fella has been hitting the sales again...

In my last By the Numbers post I looked at my Collection to Game Played ratio, the number of games I’ve played against the number I’ve played overall. I’m happy to report that, in spite of my increasing collection size, I’ve managed to keep roughly the same percentage played of the larger collection, so I am playing new games.

That said, I have a slowly growing number of games not as yet punched (and, where appropriate, clipped). Some of these are magazine games that I just haven’t got to yet, some are more daunting a prospect, like the behemoth Pacific War, Second Edition (GMT Games, 2022). In that particular case, I know it’s going to be a big task and I hate leaving a game half-punched (punching and sorting is the riskiest time for misplacing counters in my experience), and I’ve been putting it off until I have a week of evenings free to spend on it. I’m also leaning toward springing for a set of Cube 4 Me trays to accommodate the ten sheets (?!) of counters. Needless to say, all of the unpunched games fall into the “yet to be played” category.

Having sorted the core games from the expansions once more, I thought I’d take the opportunity to run some simple analytics and share the results. I could get deeper into the tall grass here, but I wanted to keep it fairly simple. If anyone would like to know more about what I’ve put together here, or if there’s something you’re desperately wondering about that I haven’t covered here, leave a comment at the end of the post and I’ll see what I can come up with.

Collection by publisher

I’ll lead off with games by publisher. While there are a number of new companies represented here, but mostly I’m a creature of habit. I tend to gravitate toward designers and publishers with which I already have some familiarity. I’ve written about how I approach collection development and acquisition previously, and I try to be open to new things, but I’m much more circumspect about what I

When I went through this last time, the collection represented twenty-seven publishers. This time the count comes in at thirty-nine. I ‘m trying to choose my games more pragmatically these days – As I’ve mentioned before, we live in an apartment and there’s only so much space and it’s getting close to peak-game.

The lion’s share of the collection is still made up of GMT Games, but their share has dropped from around 44% in the previous audit to 36.4%. This is still well ahead of the next-highest represented companies, Worthington Publishing and Compass Games at 12.4% (29 titles) and 10.3% (22) respectively (these three are the only publishers to hit double-digit percentages). Legion comes in next at eleven titles, with Flying Pig Games and Conflict Simulations Ltd tied for fifth place with eight titles each.

Twenty of the publishers are represented in the collection by a single title. This is unlikely to change in some cases; Mark Simonitch’s imprint Terran Games, I believe only produced a couple of editions of The Legend Begins: North Africa, 1940-42 (Terran Games, 1990), before embarking on his long association with GMT. Others will eventually come off that list – Clint Warren-Davey’s Gallipoli: Ordered to Die (The Dietz Foundation, ~2026), for example, should be arriving sometime in the first half of next year.

Fun fact: 14.5% of the collection – 34 games in all – are from European publishers. Honestly, I thought this would be a little higher, closer to 20%. Brian Train’s Somalia Interventions (Schutze Games, 2019) is the only game in the collection from an Australian publisher, although these are produced in the US by Blue Panther. Then again, nearly all the other games in the collection were printed and assembled in China, so no shame there.

 

Collection by Mode

Here I’ve broken the collection down into four Modes as per the Charles S. Roberts Awards format, the categories being Tactical, Operational, and Strategic, with the addition of an Abstract category to capture the odd titles like Günter Cornett’s Agamemnon (Osprey Games, 2016). This is the same way I broke the collection down the last time.

Long-time readers will know that I maintain my favourite mode of play is Operational. I enjoy the grand complication of manoeuvre and supply, further complicated by a challenging opponent. On the face of it, the numbers bely this assertion; the biggest share of the collection belong under the heading of Tactical (52.1%). I’ve come to a simple explanation for this – most of my gaming opportunities are relatively brief – three or four hours, tops, but mostly closer to two hours maximum – and I don’t have anywhere to leave a game set up. Tactical games tend to lend themselves well to shorter playing times, especially small unit exchanges as depicted in systems like Band of Brothers, Combat Commander, Conflict of Heroes or Panzer. Some larger-scale systems – <cough> Commands & Colors <cough> – also lend themselves well to a couple-hours’ play (and do away with the need to teach new rules-sets to the uninitiated each week). 

Shakos' Conquerors series is an exception to the rule, an operational level game that
 is often playable in just a few hours (pictured: Napoléon 1806 (Shakos, 2017).

Collection by Player-Count

For this tally I went with the intended player count for each game. Since 2020, a lot of companies have been making laudable efforts to offer solitaire rules for more of their games, which is great – I know how hard it can be to find a live opponent sometimes – but these are usually still designed primarily as games for two or more players. This is also a good thing; I enjoy solitaire games (and own a reasonable number, with others on my wish-list), but I prefer to pay face to face, or failing that, via a platform like Rally the Troops.

In light of these considerations, I’ve parsed the collection in terms of each game’s intended number of players. This doesn’t teel the whole story; Chancellorsville,1863 (Worthington Publishing, 2020) is intentionally a two-player game that I’ve only ever played solitaire. While there are a few other outliers, but for the most part, I’ve bought games with the full intention of playing them as their creator intended.

The majority of the collection were designed initially as two-player games, and overall percentage has nudged up a bit since the last time we looked at it. In my earlier analysis I’d included a fourth division, collecting games that had dedicated solo rules in spite of notionally a two- or multi-player game. The overall two-player count in my last analysis – including the two-player component of games with their own solitaire modes – came to a whopping 78% if the collection. In this count, the total comes to 81.6% (191 games). This stands to reason, as most traditional wargames involve two opponents slugging it out, often one side as the aggressor and the other playing defence.

I’ve been leaning into two-player games more, and on reflection, nearly all my “opportunistic” purchases – games that have come up for sale second-hand at a price I’m willing and able to pay – have been two-player tactical or operational games (in the last twelve months, I think the only outlier here was Charioteer (GMT Games, 2022) – I haven’t given up entirely on multi-player games, but I am more circumspect about how likely I will be to get them to the table. Also, the multi-player games that I do own tend to lean more toward the gamey end of the continuum, like Tank Duel (GMT Games, 2019) and Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (GMT Games, 2019)

Another plus of two player games is that many (by no means all) can be played double-handed right out of the box. Also, thanks in a large part to COVID-related lockdowns, many games these days are showing up with dedicated solitaire rules or modes of play.

I was a little surprised to see how few dedicated solitaire games I own, but according to the raw numbers, the quotient of solitaire games in the collection hasn’t budged since the last audit; I still own just twenty solitaire games, one more than the previous count (now just 8.1% of the collection). So, in the last year-and-a-half, I, Napoleon (GMT Games, 2024) – bought on a whim during the last great GMT Summer Sale and regrettably taking up real estate on my TBP shelf since – would have been my sole addition to the solitaire quotient.

 

Some thoughts

Through the course of the last year or so, I’ve grown much more pragmatic about what’s achievable in the wargaming space for me. While there are some games I’m loath to part with, I’ve come around to parting with some games that are never likely to see my table as least. I on-sold two multiplayer games that took up a lot of shelf-inches between them (Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (GMT Games, 2017) and Border Reivers: Anglo-Scottish Border Raids, 1513-1603 (GMT Games, 2023)), but these went to someone I regularly game with, so they’re still in the ecosystem (in fact, we did get to play Border Reivers earlier this year). I’m still hanging on to some multi-player games, like Versailles, 1919 (GMT Games, 2020) and Time of Crisis (GMT Games, 2017), but I can’t keep things around because I might get to play them some day. Actually, put like that, a full half of my collection could fall into that category. That notwithstanding, I have begun the process of shedding some of the games that I’m reasonably certain will never grace my table. I’d rather devote that space to something I will likely play; as stated previously, I’m getting up to peak game. Just this week I managed to sell off about eight inches of RPG materials, only to blow that PayPal credit on about seven inches of new games (these will be revealed as they arrive, but four games from two publishers – two two-player and two solitaire, much more in my wheelhouse).

On a positive note, I think I can honestly say that I haven’t been disappointed with a single game I’ve acquired since the last audit, at least the ones I’ve spent any time with, and I can’t see a reason to doubt I won’t enjoy the ones I’ve yet to dig into. I’m also leaning into system games, those that use a core rules-set to cover a multitude of situations. Of course, I’ve been doing this for years with systems like Commands & Colors and Battles of the American Revolution, but after several positive experiences with the Standard Combat Series and Men of Iron rules, I’m graduating to the grown-ups table with GBACW and my very first GBoH game, The Great Battles of Alexander (GMT Games, 2015). This ties in as much with my frugal tendencies and my wish/need to reduce the burden of learning a new game every time out of the gate.

-----

There's a lot more I could say about the collection, about recent acquisitions, and the state of gaming in general, but I need to keep something back for the Quarterly Report next month. While I was writing this up, I managed to sell some RPG books I won't be using. Payment came via PayPal, and so rather than sensibly banking the proceeds, I went Black Friday shopping with a couple of publishers that weren't doing Black Friday sales. Nonetheless, I was able to procure four games, and to cross four titles off my WANT list. So, by the end of January, the collection should be creeping up to 238 titles. At this stage I estimate Peak Game, the total number of titles I can fit in our apartment before Jess files divorce proceedings, is around the 300 mark, and that relies on getting rid of about another twelve feet of old RPG Materials. 

Wish me luck.

The Endorsement: Worthington's Holiday Sale

 

This is my third Endorsement on A Fast Game, and my second involving Worthington Publishing. I don't intend to make this kind of promotion a regular feature, but this is time-sensitive given the particular subject.

Worthington is holding their annual Holiday Sale right now. early everything is marked down. but I would draw your attention to a couple of things in particular; 414BC: Siege of Syracuse (Worthington Publishing, 2022 - review here) and 1569: Siege of Malta (Worthington Publishing, 2022 - review here) - at time of writing - are down to twelve copies each at the Worthington warehouse, and they are each available for US$20.00. That's a ridiculous price for such tight, replayable, and fun games. And while shipping is never cheap to Australia (or elsewhere) from anywhere in the US is never cheap, Worthington manages to keep it reasonable; another $40.00 for one box, or $65.00 for both.

Designer: Dan Fournie. Solo game.

Designer: Maurice Suckling. Solo, but with a two-player option.

Worthington's online store is linked above. Lots of other publishers currently have sales at the moment as well, but I'm singling these guys out because I've dealt with Grant and Mike a lot over the years and they've always been really helpful and If solitaire siege games aren't your thing, there are discounts on nearly everything in the store. Do yourself a favour and check out the sale.

Note (November 21): 1565: Siege of Malta is now sold out. There are still some copies of 414BC: Siege of Syracuse, and there are a bunch of other games still available, with deep discounts on several Civil War Brigade series games and Band of Brothers sets (note that you need to have Screaming Eagles to use Texas Arrows; the others are all stand-alone). 

State of Play: Commands & Colors: Napoleonics – Talavera (French attack on British) - 28 July 1809

 

 

After an enforced break of a month, T and I caught up on Tuesday for our (ir)regular Monday Game. Meeting at his place, T set up an old favourite (no doubt with images of Sharpe’s Eagle running through his head); the Talavera scenario from the Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) core set. He must have been feeling nostalgic, using the original blue-reverse card-deck that came with the core game.

Playing the Talavera scenario is like catching up with an old friend. Conservatively, I’d guess we’ve played it at least eight or nine times over the years, probably closer to fourteen or fifteen. For the first several years we would play each scenario twice, swapping sides the following week, and we must have played the core set through at least four or five times over the years, and in recent years it’s been a go-to game for a palette cleanser.

T set up the game, and mistakenly gave the British Rifle Light an extra block
(bringing their starting strength to four). This was corrected before the
first card play (but not before I’d taken some photos.

T – playing the French – opened with some chess movement, just getting some units off the back line. The French need to advance to engage. There’s no reward for the British to come down off the long range of high ground with its incumbent melee bonus in defence; better to let the French come into range. I adjusted units on my thin flanks to offer better firing options on my Right and to get the cavalry forward on the Left, to give it a few more options.

End of turn two: action without resolve.

Attack the French did, securing a Victory Banner in turn three and two more in the fourth turn. This along with some thinning of my infantry though accurate canon-fire; even at extended range, nearly every shot cost the British a block. With turn four, the French infantry began to reach the range of the British muskets. At the end of turn two I managed a to hit a couple of T’s infantry for a Line block and two Light infantry, but I wouldn’t seize my first French Banner until turn five. I was beginning to despair of my chances. T was due for a win, and C&C Napoleonics is in his wheelhouse.

As it turned out, T gained his full measure of success in those early rounds. Due to the initial set-up, the British are strongest in the Center (albeit with a solid anchor on their Right with a pummelling Light Regiment, and Rifle Light and Foot Artillery for extended range fire). Consecutive Assault Center orders in the fourth and fifth turns withered the first French press and earned me my first Victory Banner.

Scores even - around turn six.

T's dice luck was spent on securing his second and third banners, rolling enough hits to take out a full Line infantry unit and a Light Cavalry squadron in single rolls (this was the source of my despair. After this, his attacks were nibbling, taking blocks but never whole units. For my part, I had to make two or three attacks on every unit I eventually broke; the French fought valiantly, giving nearly as well as they received.

The final disposition of the forces. Remarkably, no Leaders were harmed in the making
of this battle (though not for want of trying).

In the end, the match ran to ten full turns, with the British securing their seventh and last Victory point in the final action of a hard-fought final round. T took the loss stoically, but it was plain to me and the attendant cats that he felt robbed after such a strong opening. I think outside influences that have interrupted out schedule lately are beginning to settle, so he’ll have another opportunity to hand me my hat next week, all things being equal.

British Orders over ten consecutive rounds. I hoped to show the French orders as well,
but T had already shuffled them back into the deck in disgust.

 

 

By the Numbers: Collection-to-Play ratio revisited

 

Action atop Ball's Bluff, for no particular reason except I was reading about the battle
the other day and it put me in mind of John Poniske's game. 

At the end of November, 2023, I posted my first By the Numbers category post, on the subject of my game collection to games played ratio. A Fast Game, in a convoluted way, grew out of a desire to play more games, and in particular the games I already owned, so the better part of a year into the blog, I wanted to see how I was doing. This month marks the second anniversary of that post, so I thought it might be edifying/sobering to revisit the subject.

Before I began writing A Fast Game - maybe fifteen or so months earlier - I’d prepared an inventory of all my game titles (wargames, family games, party games – the works). This would have probably been around the end of 2021. That list came to around about 190 titles; I think I was including all of the expansion material I that count as well, so all the Commands and Colors boxes, all the expansions for the Flying Pig games, the whole kit. At that time, I checked off all the games I’d managed to get to the table at least once, and the count came to around 22%. When I extracted the core (stand-alone) wargames from the bigger set – 117 in all – that plaid quotient rose to a shade under 25%. As an example of what I mean by core game, when I made this list, I already owned here Band of Brothers games, Screaming Eagles (Worthington Publishing, 2011), Ghost Panzer (Worthington Publishing, 2013) and Texas Arrows (Worthington Publishing, 2016). Screaming Eagles and Ghost Panzer can be played on their own, both are self-contained games using thew same mechanics Texas Arrows isn’t labelled an expansion, but it does rely on components from Screaming Eagles to play, so that one didn’t make the count. That’s when I started thinking that I really needed to start playing more wargames to justify buying more wargames, and about when I started mixing it up with my brother-in-law, T for Monday Night gaming fare.

When I tallied my games-to-games-played ratio for the first post two years ago, I had 162 core wargames. Of those 162 games, I had at that time played fifty-seven. This translated to 35.3%, a definite improvement. Which brings us to the current situation.

I’ve only started keeping a register of new (and new-to-me) games since the beginning of this year – twenty-nine thus far (thirty if you count a practically new copy of Charioteer (GMT Games, 2022), but that doesn’t make it to the “Wargame” list; I'm a sucker for a good racing-game). Between the first audit and this, the collection has grown by seventy titles, so I can extrapolate that in the thirteen months from late-November ’23 to December ’24 I gathered another forty-one titles. Put like that, it seems like a lot, not quite one a week, but not so far off. Actually, I can shave two off the count: I didn’t include two Academy Games titles on the Games list - Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear! – Russia 1941-42 (Academy Games, 2008) and Storms of Steel! – Kursk 1943 (Academy Games, 2009) - because I’d intended to sell them. (I also still have Price of Honour – Poland 1939 (Academy Games, 2010), but that’s not a stand-alone).

I’ll admit I was a little nervous preparing this post. 2025 hasn’t felt like a stellar year for trying new games. My seeming inability to satisfactorily complete my Ten Wargames Challenge list is disappointing to say the least. But apparently, I must be doing something right. As of a couple of days ago, I own 232 core wargames (the full count, including expansions and supplementary packets comes to 285 titles). I’m pleased (and more than a little relieved) to report that I have played 92 of these. The definition of “played” here has always been reasonably flexible; in most cases it constitutes at least one full game or scenario, sometimes against an opponent but more often double handed in the case of two-player games. In some cases, I have counted a game that has ended prematurely, but had exhibited a likely outcome of victory for one or the other side.

The takeaway is that my collection-to-played ratio has risen a little to 39.7%. This is a much better result than I had hoped. This has been a dry year for gaming generally for me; I had a stronger gaming year in 2024, but I’ve managed some in-roads into the collection, even as it’s been expanding (he says as if the collection is doing it all on its own). So, generally good news, but I still have a lot of games I’ve yet to get to the table, or to punch, clip and sort, for that matter.

There’s more to report from the current audit. I’ll do a breakdown of the collection by various methodologies in a week or so, and I’ll break down the year in gaming in late December like I did last year. And if you’ve made it this far, thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent meandering. There is some more edifying and entertaining stuff on its way.

 

 

The Endorsement: Worthington’s Pacific Theatre

  

 

The Old School Wargames arm of Worthington Publishing currently has a Kickstarter campaign running for three games in the company’s Travel Games line. I’ve made no apologies for being a fan of Worthington’s output generally in the past; they generally produce really nicely put together games on the rules-lighter side, and that play in between one and three hours, which suits my personal gaming circumstances. Their travel games stick to Worthington’s lane, except they are smaller (about the size of a big pencil case), and tend to play out in a shorter time frame.

Full disclosure: I don’t own any of Worthington’s travel games, and I haven’t had the opportunity to try any out, either (I’ll come back to this). I haven’t promoted their Kickstarter campaigns in the past, but this is a special case. 

Task Force templates for Midway Solitaire. Photos are taken from the KS campaign page.

The current campaign offers three titles covering different aspects of the war in the Pacific; Midway Solitaire (a new title, not to be confused with the solitaire Battle of Midway game released in World at War magazine (Decision Games) in 2017 and repackaged as Midway Solitaire Deluxe in 2021),  a reprint of one of their first travel games, Pacific War 1942 (Worthington Publishing, 2024),and a refashioned Tarawa 1943 (Worthington Publishing, 2021). 

Anyone who has been reading A Fast Game from the start will know that Tarawa 1943 is one of my all-time favourite fast-playing solo games. It’s been out of print for a while, the Worthington folks are innovators, reimagining this classic block game as a small, travel-friendly game with a smaller footprint with cardstock components replacing the blocks, but maintaining the depth and intensity of the original game. 

The refashioned Tarawa 1943 map. Neoprene maps are available for all three games
as add-ons, if that's your thing.

Tarawa is the only one I can speak to personally. There is a wealth of content available on YouTube regarding Pacific War 1942 – a quick search brought up play-throughs by Zilla Blitz and the Player’s Aid, as well as a short review by Grant from TPA. But I can wholeheartedly endorse Tarawa 1943. 

You don’t have to buy all three games – there are options for backing just one or two if you prefer, though shipping overseas favours multiple purchases. At time of posting there is about sixteen days remaining on the campaign, so check it out.

Stripped Down for Parts: World War 1 Dual Pack: 1914 Glory’s End / When Eagles Fight

  

 

 

Like a lot of wargamers, the Great War held little interest for me when I took my first steps into the hobby. It’s probably fair to say that the hobby didn’t take a big interest in World War I either, until it had partaken of the then more recent Second World War, and the perennial favourites of the Age of Napoleon and the American Civil War.

In the last five or so years, I’ve developed an interest in World War I games (more than a decade longer than that if you count my deep obsession with Wings of Glory (Ares Games, 2012) when it was still called Wings of War (Nexus Editrice, 2004). I own maybe half a dozen games covering the either aspects of the war or the whole European theatre, and I’ve just started reading Barbera Tuchman’s The Guns of August, so it seemed like a good time to take a look at this recent acquisition, a hitherto unpunched copy of 1914: Glory's End / When Eagles Fight (GMT Games, 2014).

The two games featured in originally appeared roughly a year apart in Command magazine (When Eagles Fight in 1993, and 1914: Glory’s End in 1994). These were well received, and the rerelease of the two games as a boxed set for the centennial year of the beginning of the Great War made for a popular release.

At the moment of annihilation. Twenty years later, photographer Robert Capa
would capture a similar moment during the Spanish Civil War
in his famous photograph, The Fallen Man.

The cover illustration presents a young French soldier at the moment of his death, an allegory for the nation’s dual loss of youth and innocence It was by French artist Léon Réni-Mel, who is better known as a late Impressionist painter, but created a fairly substantial body of military art. Réni-Mel also served as an infantryman in the French army and painted this watercolour sometime during the Great War, and it was donated to the Musée de l'Armée – probably by the artist, and first exhibited in 1918. It remains a part of the museum’s collection to this day.

The work is referenced by a couple of varying titles, but the intended title is most likely Fantassin français chargeant des positions allemandes (French infantryman charging German positions). It was dedicated by the artist to his comrades-at-arms who killed or wounded during the First Battle of the Marne.

Mind the gap: box technology has come a long way in the last ten years.

The box-back is set out in the classic GMT style of the time, with cut-outs featuring the two game maps and some sample counters (a little larger than actual size), with a two-paragraph description of the background and parameters of each game; it’s worth mentioning here that while both games primarily field units at the corps level, the two games play over different periods of the war: Glory’s End covers only the first three months of campaigning on the Western Front (the time before the theatre settled into an entrenched meat-grind), but When Eagles Fight covers the whole term of the Eastern Front conflict.

The Difficulty-meter puts the games at a 4 out of 9 (the low end of Medium) and the solitaire suitability at 7 out of 9. Looking over the rules, I don’t think there’s going to be anything terribly fiddly to deal with, and I think the higher solitaire rating fits the game as well. I’ll probably be taking these out for a turn on my own before I get to play them with an opponent, so I’ll get to test that hypothesis.

Glory's End Rulebook. The World War 1 logo was a branding motif that
carried through several GMT titles.

Each game comes with its own rulebook. These are printed on matte paper (this feels like about 90 gsm) and are full-colour throughout, though not profusely illustrated; don’t expect graphic-rich examples of play here.

GE rulebook sample page. Clear and readable. No index,
but at twenty pages you barely need one.

The Glory’s End rulebook runs to twenty pages, of which the first four pages are given over to a cover page (incorporating a Table of Contents), a brief Introduction, and an explanation of the game’s components and abbreviations used in the rules. The Core Rules take up just twelve pages, and the last three pages cover the optional Dummy Counters rule, the Battle of the Marne mini-scenario (more on this later) and the short “historical” scenario covering just the first month of the war on the Western Front (ten turns), with a Turn Sequence Outline helpfully printed on the back cover page. The rules look pretty straight forward and understandable for anyone with some experience with operational level hex and counter wargames.

Glory's End map-sheet. It will be flatter under a sheet of plexi.

The two maps strike a good balance between playable area and useful charts and tracks. I prefer game boards that at least build Action or Resource Point tracks into the play surface, as this means less time spent away from the actual board. This is, of course not always achievable, but here it works nicely. The map is situated in the middle of the sheet, an imperfect square taking in Belgium, Luxembourg, northern France and potions of Switzerland, Germany, and Holland. National boundaries are marked with a dashed red line along hex borders, so no arguing between players over “accidental” invasions of neutral countries. The Turn Record Track and dual-purpose Victory Points and Replacement Track are located on the western end of the map, while the Terrain Effects Chart, Combat Results Table (duplicated to face each player, and the Siege Gun Table (German player side only) are placed along the Eastern edge of the map-sheet. Three-quarter inch hexes accommodate the 5/8^th counters comfortably (I will be clipping the counters before I get the game to the table anyway).

The map itself is clear and easy to read, with forest, mountains major and minor rivers and major towns/cities clearly indicated, and the scale is nine miles to a hex. It’s a boon to have the TEC printed on the map for ease of checking movement and combat effects on the fly, though these usually become second nature after three or four turns. There is enough territory covered to meet the historical parameters of the Western Front’s opening months without feeling confined; this is the stage of the war when the Front was dynamic and subject to fairly rapid change, before any illusions of a quick victory for either side gave way to the molasses-creep of a static frontline.

The Marne Mini-Map, for those times when you want a little less gratuitous bloodshed.

Also included is a Marne Mini-Map. This is printed on the same weight cardstock as the Player Aids (which we will get to shortly). The map is a letter-sized (roughly 11 ½” by 8 ½”) and is provided for the smallest scenario in the game (just five turns). The map is an abstract of the larger campaign map, covering from Paris on the western edge to about fifteen miles short of Verdun (just off-map). Both the primary map-sheet and the Marne mini-map are scaled at 9½ miles to a hex.

The Marne map allows players to play out just the First Battle of the Marne without having to resort to the full map. This scenario should be a great introductory game, as nearly all the rules for the full game are still at play here, but the space and time requirement has been truncated to a manageable level – the battle game should be playable on a school night.

Interestingly, this seems to be a battle of particular interest to the designer, Ted Raicer. His earlier Western Front game, Grand Illusion: Mirage of Glory, 1914 (GMT Games, 2004) also includes a First Battle of the Marne scenario, though this is played over a restricted number of hexes on the game’s map-sheet.

Glory's End counter-sheets.

The counters for both games are ⅝” and clearly presented with big numerals in bold, rolling serif font and slightly smaller NATO symbols, making them quite readable, even without reading glasses. Set up is eased with a tiny four-digit hex-number on the top-left corner of the unit counters that begin the game on the map, or a shorter number for the unit’s entry turn (if you’re like me, you’ll almost certainly need your reading glasses for the location or turn numbers, set at about two-point).

There are a few issues with counter registration. I’m quick to point out this doesn’t affect the units; in both games some of the administrative markers are vertically unaligned, not to the point of being unplayable, by any means. I’m not angry; I’m just disappointed. (Though, to be fair, it really hasn’t been that long that we’ve seen consistently good counter registration from most publishers – how quickly we forget).

The units run from one-step to four steps, the three- and four-step units having two counters. Higher step units are marked with a small number in a coloured circle left of the NATO symbol. There is nothing provided to help manage the multi-counter units or those that enter play in later turns, but as one might expect, fans have stepped up with organisation mats for each game downloadable from the Files section of the Boardgamegeek game page (link from the title above).

Glory's End PAC.

The Players’ Aid cards (PACs) for both games are printed on a decent weight of cardstock and are duplicate pairs for each of the games. The Glory’s End PAC is single-sided, and features the Combat Results Table and the Siege Gun Table (a belt-and-braces approach given this information’s availability on the map-sheet), as well as the Victory Point values of various locations for each side.

Roster sheets are used in the free set-up scenario (no peeking during set-up, please).

Glory’s End also comes with a Roster Sheet Pad. This is for the use of players choosing the Free Set Up Scenario, rather than the historical set-up. The guidelines for the free set up advise one player, then the other to set up their units’ free placement starting positions and then record each unit and its placement hex-number on a piece of paper (each while the other is looking away). I haven’t counted off the number of sheets, but it feels like abo fifteen or so with a light cardboard backing.

The I get the impression that the pad may have been a lasty minute addition and the rules were never updated to mention it. It would speed up the process somewhat, as it lists the antagonists’ forces, grouped by formation, with a space to write down the hex-location. I’m broadly less interested in counterfactual games, but this could be an interesting exercise, though I’ll probably need to play with the historical placement for or five times, before I’d be tempted to try something different.

WEF rulebook.

Like its sister game, the rulebook for When Eagles fight runs to 20 pages, and follows roughly the same format. The actual rules run to about twelve pages, with the last two internal pages given over to two scenario variations, “Russian Plan 19” and “Schlieffen East Variant,” Players’ and Designer’s notes, and a perfunctory Turn Sequence on the back cover. Again, this has been addressed on BGG with a player-created Extended Sequence of Play prepared by Gary (Ardwulf) Mengle, from when he did a multi-part play-through on his YouTube channel.

When Eagles Fight map.

The map for When Eagles fight is printed on the verso of the Glory’s End map, and benefits from the same style of treatment. At 24 miles to a hex, the scale of the map is larger, befitting the sprawling range of the conflict. Again, the CRT is built right into the play area, along with a Random Events Table (German side), Ammunition Shortage Table (Russian side), Strategic Movement constraints table (both), and a shared Accumulated Replacements track, as well as a Terrain Effects Chart and, at the other end of the map, the Turn Track, which incorporates information like Victory Check turns. The turns in WEF are one to two months (over the months of November through April, covering winter and the spring thaw, or Rasputitsa, the turns cover two months each).

WEF Counter-sheets. I do like a low-density game.

As previously mentioned, the counters are five-eighths of an inch and quite readable. WEF has just one and a half sheets of counters, The same stipulation applies for the poor registration on the lowest rows of the counter-sheets, but the units are all quite fine. I’ve been punching out and clipping the counters, starting with the When Eagles Fight sheets while I write this post. The cardstock is a tad thinner than what you mostly get from a GMT game these days, and they’ve been a joy to clip – no careful easing the counters into the slot so you accidently delaminate them (this has happened once or twice – these days I test-clip the corners of each sheet before I embark on the actual counters).

When Eagles Fight PAC.

The PAC for When Eagles Fight is arguably more useful than its Glory’s End counterpart. It’s double-sided, with the charts and tables on the front and a list of initialled Random Events (that correspond to the red lettered chits on the left side of the full counter-sheet)., explaining the game effects and clauses for each random event. The Tables replicate those found on the map-sheet, but the CRT here includes all the relevant modifier notes left off the map table.

Box, dice and baggies.

I’m always a little surprised when an unpunched second-hand game crosses my path, but really surprised when it still has all its bits. I don’t resent replacing a pair of dice or something – this comes under the heading of general wear and tear – but Glory’s End/When Eagles fight still had its dice (in their own zip-loc baggie), and its original roll of storage bags. This is a rare find, and it makes me wonder if the previous owner did anything more with the game than tear the shrink off and have a gander at the components.