State of Play: playtesting Great Northern War – Part 1

 

  

I’ve been taking some time away from my regular playing and writing lately because I’ve been working on something that I didn’t feel at liberty to write about. But it’s now out in the world, and I can now talk about a new game from designer Ray Weiss and his company, Conflict Simulations LLC, Great Northern War (CSL, 2024). Let me say at the outset that this isn’t a review, because I haven’t seen the finished product, but this is the kind of game that might be lost in the maelstrom of neat games from small publishers, so I wanted to highlight what I think makes Great Northern War special. I’m going to look at the game in two parts. Here, I’ll show you what my kit-bashed prototype looked, and talk a little about how it all fits together. In the second part I’ll talk about the playtesting process, the inevitability – and the virtue – of making mistakes, and how we (probably) helped make a really good game a little better.

I’d been proofing the system rules for Afrika Army Korps, the next game in Conflict Simulations’ DAMOS series. CSL has three DAMOS titles out currently, Army Group North (CSL, 2019), Army Group Center (CSL, 2019), and Army Group South (CSL, 2019). These can be played in one grand campaign game with combined maps.

While I was going through the DAMOS rules, the Great Northern War rules arrived. Ray had set up a Table Top Simulator module for playtesting and asked if I’d help out, but I’m a klutz when it comes to technology and could not get it to work.* But taking a first pass at the rules, I was intrigued; this was a different beast to any wargame I’d come across before. I really wanted to see how this would work, so I asked Ray for the artwork, and he forwarded me the files.

Build me a game

DIY Control Markers (not pretty, but functional).

After a trip to Officeworks for the colour printing, I set about building my own copy of Great Northern War. The result wasn’t pretty, but it was functional. The game components are cylinders labelled with the unit facings, like a Columbia block game, but for ease I used left over Commands and Colours: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) blocks, the spares you always get in the sets. French (navy) and Russian (green) blocks with allies in other colours matching as close to the instructions as possible and glued the printed-off leader labels on them with a glue stick. I used wooden blocks from another game as the supply dump tokens and used some blank 9/16ths chits as reversable control markers. The play map I printed at A3 size – about 140% larger than the actual board, partly to compensate for the oversize pieces, partly because I’m old and big enough to admit small print can be a challenge.

DIY Leader markers (Ottomans not mounted yet).

I had a cheap set of playing cards and some spare Avery label sheets and made my own Decision Cards (face cards, aces, and jokers). The game is influenced by the Event Cards of Hitler’s Reich (GMT Games, 2018) that can be purchased by the player for a one-off or on-going benefit, at the cost of a card from their hand (sometimes two), reducing their temporary hand-size. Hand-size is something I’ll swing back to in a minute. The 10s are also separated out. These can be purchased as well, and their virtue is you can play them once per round, but they stay with you (they don’t go back into the draw deck), and they don’t count to your hand-size.

DIY Decision Cards (and tens, Black suits for Swedes, Red for the Coalition).

How it works

The remainder of the deck – the twos through nines, minus the drawn trump card – make the draw deck. Each turn, the players are dealt a hand each, according to their hand size (this is a crucial factor in the game; again, like in Hitler’s Reich, if you can manage to reduce your opponent’s hand-size to zero, you get an automatic victory – and control of trade in central Europe for the next twenty or thirty years). When to play a trick, or respond to a trick from your opponent, you’ll be using a card from your hand. Each time a trick is played, both players draw a replacement card from the draw deck. When the deck is empty, all the cards are reshuffled, the turn marker moves up, and a new trump is drawn.

Trick-taking is the driver of the game. Whatever action you want to take, you’ll probably have to lead a trick. If you win, you get to do the declared action; if you lose, play goes to the other team.

Initial set-up, with Turn and Diplomatic Appeals tracks, and 

blue cubes (off-board) for Swedish supply  depots. 

Each turn, a new trump suit is drawn and marked on a track on the board. When playing a trick, the higher-value card will beat the lower one, but a trump suit card will beat anything except a higher-value trump. Before Great Northern War, I’d never played a trick-taking game before – growing up we never even had a deck of cards in the house – so this was all new to me.

Both sides begin with some of their Leaders already placed on the board. Leaders represent the military leader and their associated strength of numbers. To deploy a reserve Leader, first you’ll have to win a trick. To activate a Leader for movement, you’ll have to win a trick.

Combat is a little different. When you engage in combat, attacker and defender will each choose a card and place it face-down in front of them, to be revealed simultaneously. The card value will be added to the command value of the Leader engaging in the battle, along with any modifiers, then each player rolls a pair of dice, and that result is added to the total. The higher number wins (draws to the defender), but the margin of victory is where things get interesting. A margin of a couple of points might see one or the other side have to retreat a space or two to avoid a loss point, but a big enough margin could see the losing side’s troops removed from the board, and if a recovery roll goes badly, even permanently from the game.

Setting up an early game (Hand-size tokens missing, Anti-Swedish
track-marker at wrong end of track).

There is a lot going on in Great Northern War. It really is a simple game to learn and play, but it’s strategically deep, with multiple pathways to (a potential) victory, and the brinksmanship with the trick-leading driver adds a constant undercurrent of stress. As does the general hand-management required to ensure you’re not caught out cardless. Taking your opponent’s capitals will reduce their hand-size (there’s a handy hand-size reminder on the right-hand side of the board) but taking them and keeping them is harder than you might think. Combat is swift and often brutal. And every time you want to take an action, even something as simple as waking up a general and getting him to haul ass to the neighbouring town or set up a supply dump, there’s a good chance that your intentions will be frustrated by the turn of a card.

I’m trying hard not to write a review of the game – I’d feel weird about reviewing something I was involved in developing, even this tangentially – but I will go a little further into what I think the game gets right and who it will likely appeal to.  Here I've tried to offer a glimpse at how the game works, in pretty broad brushstrokes. In Part 2, I'll take a deeper look at the game's internal interactions, as well as some of the dumb mistakes I made on the road to learning all of that, and what came out of it in the end. 

 

* This was all on me. In truth, we replaced the old desktop a month or two before Christmas, and I’d simply forgotten to install it on the new machine. If You have access to TTS, I believe the playtest module may still be available; search for Great Norther War on Steam.