Stripped Down for Parts: Imperial Tide: The Great War, 1914-1918

 

 

Charles S, Roberts Award nominee: Best World War I Game, 2022

 

Gregory M. Smith is a firm candidate for the hardest working man in Wargames (though Herman Luttman and David Thompson may be giving him a run for his money). One of the originators of the narrative generation-style games, his The Hunters (ComSim Press, 2013) and its sibling games, Smith (according to BoardGameGeek) has no less than sixteen games in print (all in the last ten years) with another three listed on BGG at impending (Rebel Tide: the American Civil War (Compass Games, ~2024 – this has been flagged to release in the first half of this year), the next of the Tide games, British Tank Ace (Compass Games, ~2024 – Bill Thomas, owner of Compass, has flagged this one for a probably third of fourth quarter release this year), a successor to the wildly successful American Tank Ace (Compass 2022), and Spitfire Ace: Air Defense over Britain, 1940 (Compass, ~2025)). On top of this, Smith is a regular at some of the notable game conventions in the States, and always brings with him a half-dozen more prototypes of games he has in the works.

The upcoming Rebel Tide is the third in Smith’s “Tide” series of games. It follows on from Pacific Tide (Compass Games, 2019 – which I have looked at previously here) and Imperial Tide: The Great War, 1914-1918 (Compass Games, 2022), which is our subject for today.

Imperial Tide is a two-player (solitaire friendly) game that covers the entirety of the First World War in Europe and the Near East. It’s a big call for a game that should play out in three to four hours. If you’re looking for

The Tide series card-purchase mechanic first appeared in Mitchell Ledford and Smith’s Ostkrieg: WWII Eastern Front (Compass Games, 2020), which, due to the vagaries of the production processes involved, actually came out the year following the release of Pacific Tide. While receiving a co-design credit for the game, Smith has always been up-front about the card-purchase mechanism shared by all the games was Ledford’s brainchild. But Smith saw its potential, how it could be applied to other conflict situations.

For me, the box art is possibly the weakest part of the whole package. I don’t have a problem with the art itself. It’s a fine piece of work by any standard; the clutch of soldiers (in BEF garb) boldly facing the carnage to come is reminiscent of propaganda posters from the period. To me, it just doesn’t convey the scope of the game, which covers an entire continent. I want to be clear that it’s just me thinks this; nearly everyone I’ve shown to has commented on the great or evocative the cover art.

The box back features some map detail (Western Front, of course), some sample counters sand some sample cards; one Year Card (I’ll come back to this later) and two Game Cards (including the Schlieffen Plan card that gets every game rolling, in the same way the Pearl Harbor card is always the first played in Pacific Tide.

The box-back informs us that Imperial Tide is a two-player game, that you'll need to set aside three to four hours to play it to completion, and that the recommended age for players is 14+, which sounds about right to me. The solitaire suitability is rated as high; I haven't yet played Imperial Tide, but on the strength of having played Pacific Tide solo a couple of times now, I would vouch for this. 

Sample pages.

The rulebook is functional and reasonably clearly presented. It probably helps to already be familiar with Pacific Tide (in my case) or Ostkrieg, but I don’t imagine the rules or concepts that drive Imperial Tide offering any kind of challenge to learning for an experienced wargamer. The rulebook is not without its problems (I’ll come back to this later), but they are eminently readable and good use is made of illustrations to demonstrate how the rules work dynamically.

The board is mounted, the requisition 22” by 34” in size, and presents a point-to-point map of Europe from the southern England to Turkey, Denmark to Spain. It also incorporates two Combat Result Tables (one facing each side of the board – no neck cramps trying to twist around to see it), and the two sides’ Resource Point tracks, as well as a "terrain" key. The map board is a nice piece of work, adorned with period propaganda posters representative of the belligerent states, and incorporating a space for the Year Card currently in play. Tim Allen was the artist responsible for the project, and the map, cards and counters all maintain a consistent look and feel.

The counters and game markers are of the easy-punch variety, .75” and pre-rounded. They look and feel nice to use, with a matt finish. Troop markers are denoted by a figure of a soldier and the flag of the represented nation. Artillery counters represent stockpiles of ordinance prepared in advance for pushes, rather than the artillery pieces themselves that were ubiquitous along the fronts in the war.

Other counters include the markers to designate a change in control of a location to the other side used to keep track of each country’s resource points. Resource points are the currency each nation uses to wage war, and they are a scarce commodity. These are kept track of on the board, clearly in the view of both players.

The troop counters exhibit a single value. This is the represented strength. The units are numbered, 1, 2, 3, etc. and can be swapped out or made “change” (i.e., a 5-value counter swapped out for a 3 and two 1s, or vice versa) as convenient). There are no less than thirteen nationalities of troops represented, the background colours of which correspond to the colours of locations on the map-board. Troops can be mobile of entrenched. When entrenched the counter is flipped to exhibit a marker declaring the troops current state. When they move, they will, of course, loose this status. There are no naval or arial forces in featured in the game; these are abstracted into events made available through the play of cards.

Like its series predecessors, Imperial Tide uses Year cards to guide the play experience along roughly historical lines (but not to the point of railroading the game’s narrative; there’s still plenty or rom for ahistorical deviation). The thing that the Great War, the war in the Pacific, and the Nazi Eastern Front (and to some degree, the American Civil War, for that matter) have in common is the aggressors’ initial forays being compelling and forceful but reaching a turning point (the ebbing tide) from where victory becomes ever less feasible. The use of Year Cards to set new parameters for each round in the game helps approximate this shift in game terms.

This next part hurts a little to talk about, but it needs to be addressed. The game comes with a double-sided errata sheet. To be fair, most of these items on the list are clarifications of various rules as stated in the published text, nine in all. Along with these clarifications, there are three additional rules, three corrections to the existing rules, a correction to two cards (cards 19 and 20 in the Allied deck are marked as available from 1916, but this should read 1917) and some typos on the cards and board.

My copy of the game, although it doesn’t seem to say so, is a second printing of Imperial Tide. It was released in early 2022 (the copyright date in the box is 2021) and sold out very quickly. I managed to nab a copy from the second run, which came into the warehouse I believe around the middle of last year.  None of the errata mentioned going to break the game, but I feel like the additional rules could have been incorporated into the rulebook without too much resetting, and perhaps the mistyped cards could have been redone before the second printing was run. I’ve worked as an editor on biggish documents, and I know how easy it is for multiple readers to miss something, but I thin with a second printing comes an opportunity to fix known problems. Having said that, changing things can have knock-on effects down the line where printing is concerned, so maybe it was a line-call whether to try to fix the known errata or to let it stand.

I ordered my copy of Imperial Tide direct from Compass Games. I received two copies of the errata sheet, so maybe Bill knew I’d be picky and wanted to get ahead of it.  

As I’ve come to expect from Compass Games, the package came with enough baggies to accommodate all the counters and markers for the game with some sensible sorting. What surprised me is that, in a first, the (good quality, 16mm) dice came not sealed in a little cellophane baggie that I’ll have to throw out later, but free range, unhindered and allowed to roam the box at will. I’ll wait to see if this is a trend from Compass or a one off, but if it becomes the norm, I won’t begrudge the lack of one more bit on non-recyclable plastic to deal with.

So, Imperial Tide; this was one of my most anticipated games of 2022, and I managed to get a copy before the end of 2023 (I bought this and issue No. 81 of Paper Wars, with Hermann Luttmann’s Position Magnifique: The Battle of Mars-la-Tour, 1870 (Compass Games, 2013) during Compass’s annual summer sale. I’m really looking forward to getting this to the table, and I hope to get a review out sooner rather than later (and another for Position Magnifique). As always, if you’re still reading this, thanks for staying with me this far.

Stripped Down for Parts: Pacific Tide: The United States vs Japan, 1941-45

 

 

It seems like everyone is having a sale. After going a little harder than I’d intended on the GMT sale (more unboxings to come), I heard the siren song of Compass Games’ annual sale calling to me and found I could not resist. What sealed the deal was a request from a friend to secure a game for Christmas for his son, which halved the postage cost. How could I say no?

I was leaning toward Imperial Tide: the Great War, 1914-1918 (Compass Games, 2022). This is a two-player card-driven game covering the entire European theatre of the First World War and has been described by some uncharitable or less-imaginative folk as PoG-Lite (in reference to Ted Racier’s enduring classic, Paths of Glory (GMT Games, 1999), now in its sixth printing. But I’ve read that the Tide system is a bit of a departure in its design philosophy and that the best way in was through its origin games, so I thought that's where I should start. At least, that was the plan.

I didn’t realise when I ordered it that Pacific Tide: The United States versus Japan, 1941-45 (Compass Games, 2019) was actually the second Card-Driven Game (CDG) designed using an innovative card purchase system. The designer, Gregory M. Smith, mentions in his designer notes that Mitchell Ledford first came up with the card-purchase mechanic for his game, Ostkrieg: WWII Eastern Front (Compass Games, 2020), which Smith also worked on, but due to Compass’s prodigious development pipeline, Pacific Tide happened to beat Ostkrieg to release. So Pacific Tide was, indeed, the first card-purchase CDG to hit the stores by a few months. You can understand the confusion.

Pacific Tide comes in a sturdy 1” deep box, which surprised me a little. I don’t resent it being in such a slim package – that’s another inch of shelf-space to go toward something else – and there really isn’t any reason for a deeper box in this instance. The game doesn’t come with a travel insert.

Once punched, everything fits with the counters and dice divvied up into the bags provided, and I suspect you could even squeeze a GMT counter tray in there with the board, rules and PACs, though I haven’t experimented with this. (but definitely not a DVG deep-dish tray).

I really appreciate the sheer volume of information conveyed on the back of a Compass Games game-box. They have a fairly standardised display of information pertaining to both the parameters of the game (rule complexity, turn, map, and unit scale), as well as average game duration, solitaire suitability (sometimes with explanatory notes, like "no hidden movement"), numbers of players and a very realistic age recommendation.

The rules for Pacific Tide were the hardest part of the package for me to come at, in the beginning. Cutting my teeth on SPI’s procedural delivery of rules, that’s what I tend to expect from a wargame. The rules to Pacific Tide are a departure from what I’m used to seeing in a rules-set. Everything you need to know is there, and in a natural format, one thing leading logically from the last. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it’s that there’s a measure of informality to the rules and I found jarring, but at the same time, conveyed everything I needed to understand how the game worked and why things happen in a certain way. This is a good rules-set; everything is conveyed simply and understandably. I think my OCD would like to see more subheadings.

While the rules book is a scant sixteen pages in length, this includes a representation of counters, front and back, and the brief but very informative Designer's Notes. The actual rules make up just eleven pages, with liberal use of illustrations to convey concepts used in the game. This should be an easy game to teach.

The gameboard for Pacific Tide is a mounted 17” by 22” space encompassing the whole Pacific theatre using a point-to-point location system. A spider-web of linking rods connect tangible locations like Truk, Okinawa, Hawai’i and the Marshall Islands, and less tangible ocean spaces. All the locations are both labelled and numbered, with the open ocean positions labelled with the blue background. This is a handy visual reminder; at the end of a round (one calendar year of game time) ships cannot be located in the open ocean. Any that cannot make it to a safe anchorage in their final movement are lost.

The board is simple and utilitarian, but nonetheless quite attractive. It’s a nice board to play on. I really like the almost watercolour-rendered style of the ocean and land-masses. Location labels and other directive materials are all clear

Pacific Tide makes do with a single sheet of half-inch counters. The units represented are fleet ships, carriers, land- and carrier-based air units, and army/marine units. On the face of it, this might seem too abstracted to make for a satisfying play experience, but in the context of how the game plays out, it works remarkably well. All the units have a numerical rating of one to five. These represent the number of units in attendance at a particular point.

Most locations have a limit of five of any land-based unit at a location, while some of the smaller islands have much smaller limits. You can use a fleet ship 5 marker to represent the size of a force at a particular location, or you can make change, swapping the 5 for a 2 and a 3 if you want to split your forces in a move action. I’ll admit, it wasn’t exactly intuitive to begin with, but as soon as I wrapped my cotton-filled grognard head around the concept, it became the most natural thing to consolidate or divide forces, but for stack management, and prospectively to hide your intentions from your opponent.

Some might take issue with the position of the Australian locations on the map. Brisbane is just about right, but Fremantle (Perth’s port, and a significant harbour for submarine operations during the war) seems to have been geographically confused with Broome. I’m just grateful Australia was featured at all. In fact – and this was done purely as a stylistic choice on Smith’s part – British and Australian control markers are included in the mix, as are Commonwealth ships and troops, which is kind of cool.

Other counters (apart from the aforementioned location Control counters) include reminder markers for the attitude of the “bot” in solo mode (from year to year, the solo player rolls for the attitude of the game’s AI, which can behave in an Aggressive, Moderate or Defensive posture, and Movement reminder markers (three in all).

Sorry, I should have photographed them on a sheet of paper.

There are two 24-card decks in Pacific Tide, one each for the Allies and the Japanese, and each deck is divided into separate years, starting with 1941, and going through to 1945. The cards are the engine of the game. A year-turn ends when both players have either passed or have no more cards to play (which forces them to pass, I guess). Because the history covers so little of 1941, there are only a couple of cards for each layer for that year (the first truncated turn, which always begins with the Japanese player attacking Pearl Harbor).

The majority of the cards are made available in 1942. 1943 and the subsequent turns is where it gets (mechanically) interesting. Along with a lesser number of year-cards, the players each have a number of points to “buy” previously played cards. From 1842 on, each players selection for that year is shuffled, then split into two. You ply out all the cards in the first half of your “hand” before picking up the second half. You may have a pretty good idea of what cards you have to play, but until you pick up that first half-hand, you won’t know what you’ll have to play when. At the scale of the game, it makes for a good approximation of the fog of war.

The Player Aid Cards – there are two identical cards included – Are good, but maybe not as good as they could have been. On one side is pretty much everything you need to know as a player for the two-player game. It has a Sequence of Play, a short Summary of Key Points, and a brain dump of procedures and rules exceptions, all printed on a background of the CV photograph from the box cover. It’s all useful information at the table, but I feel like a little more care in the presentation could have made it a really great PAC.

On the reverse side are the guidelines for the solo bot. This is actually a work of genius. It’s a simple approach to what can be a difficult tool to get right. At the start of each year, you role for the posture of the enemy (Aggressive, Balanced, or Defensive). The cards of the two deck each feature an unobtrusive A, B or D, When playing the bot’s turn in a solo game, you draw three cards, and play the one that matches the bot’s posture that year. You still have to make some of the decisions for the opposing side, but anyone who regularly solos two-player games will be able to do this easily enough.

Sixteen dice, sealed for freshness.

The game comes with two things in abundance, dice and baggies. This is the first game I’ve bought in a while that actually came with enough baggies to separate out the counters reasonable and meaningful way. I couldn’t wait to try this out, so I punched and clipped the counter sheet the same day I took the photos for this piece, and set it up a couple of days later to get a feel for it. When I set it up, I just dumped the baggie contents into plastic dishes, and sorted out from there. It can be a little difficult finding the right numbered pieces to “make change” for the pieces, and for the sake of space, all the ships are in one pot, all the planes -land-based and carrier-based – in another, rather than sorting CVs from fleet ships for each side. My only criticism with the counters is that, with the rich, darker background colours, White may have been a better design choice for the values than black. It a minor thing, and not one I’m going to stop playing over.

Set up and ready to play.

I should apologise for dropping so much rules-related chatter into what was supposed to be a standard unboxing. I normally try to keep that kind of thing for the review, so some inevitably bleeds into my game-play reports as well. The more I read of the rules and the more I looked at the game, the keener I was to get it to the table and push some counters around. I only ran through 1941 and most of 1942 in my first try out, and made a couple of mistakes. I’m hoping to get it to the table again this week, in which case, I’ll write up a sit-rep for the readers’ edification. Meanwhile, thanks for reading this far.

 

 

State of Play: WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (solo, second run)

  

I took another stab at WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020) the other day, sticking with the three-turn scenario, as I only had a little less than two yours available. I’m pleased to report that I believe the only mistakes I made this time around were all tactical.

I’m playing both sides, obviously, but I’ve been putting the most effort into trying to attain success as the Germans. This casts the Allies (Americans all in this scenario) in a defensive posture, which is about right historically, and is very simple to play – just look at what the Germans are trying to do and do what you can to thwart that. So far, the Allies have been successful taking this stance.

I was determined to try to make the run to the Meuse, at least to get a unit in an adjacent area, if not actually gaining full control by the end of the third day (December 18). I’s still convinced it should be possible, but that goal eluded me this time out as well. To be fair, I’ve been playing the American forces pretty aggressively, as soon as they actually can act; the Germans get three uncontested activations before the December 16 turn starts. The thing is, I now believe I haven’t been making the best use of those early activations.

Morning, December 17 (Beginning of turn 2).

The key for the Germans is mobility, and the key to mobility is controlling the road network, or at least enough of it to be able to funnel their armour forward (west), toward the Meuse. Things are going to get more difficult with the arrival of reinforcements in the second turn, so it’s crucial to move up as many units as you can in the initial push, but there lies the rub.

Armour units can move two spaces (three during strategic movement, but only on roads and within controlled spaces, and for the Germans, only from turn 2 (17^th December). I need to find a way to push my infantry units west to secure (Control) farther regions to expedite armour movement.

Thus far, I’ve been thinking like an old-school wargamer (analogous to a role-player treating an investigative scenario like a dungeon crawl). Playing a wargame, you’d think that this would be the right approach, but now I’m wondering. I was catching up on The War Room on YouTube. Thomas Van Hare (from Historic Wings) was talking about the reaction of some reviewers to his game SOE: Lysander (Historic Wings, 2023). Many reviewers have complained that the missions are too tough, but Van Hare suggested that they are approaching the missions like a wargamer, when they should be thinking like a pilot. He said, if a mission was shaping up to be too difficult, instead of ploughing on regardless and hoping for a miracle, a pilot would turn around and head home, and try again the next night.

Not every enemy unit has to be destroyed to take it out of the game. It was one of those times when you read the rules, and you comprehend the rules, but it’s not until you engage with the game that you understand the rules. I read the rules about out of supply units (can’t move, can’t initiate combat, and when they defend, it’s at the value shown on the Out of Supply marker placed on top of the unit. In the south I managed to get German troops forward far enough to envelope the American 4^th Infantry, cutting off their supply lines, and essentially enfeebling them. In the north, though, the weaker infantry and recon (Greyhound) units have been goading me to attack, and I’ve bitten each time. This has cost me dearly, tying up valuable resources, because as weak as they may seem, I haven’t been able to dislodge them in a single action, no matter what I throw as them. Better to envelope these pesky units like I did with the 4^th, then move on (if at all possible).

End of the third (final) turn. Closer, but no Meuse.

The Germans were more successful at removing American units from the board than the first time I played, but that doesn’t amount to victory. Well, some “elite” units on both sides have a one-victory-point value, but neither have enough of them to make wholesale massacre a winning strategy. If the Germans don’t meet their goals, and in a timely manner, before the fuel starts to run out, then it’s the Allies game. Mark Herman quipped that the Germans lose every Bulge game, but the fun part is watching how they lose.

Allied casualties (not not a VP among them).

All in all, I think I feel confident enough with WWII Commander to introduce someone else to the game now, but I want to take one more run at the short scenario, and maybe double-handed solo a full game if I can carve out a big enough chunk of time to do it justice. Unfortunately, there are other things vying for my attention at the moment; Pacific Tide (Compass Games, 2019) arrived last week, and I’ve been reading through the rules. It’s a very high-level take on the entire Pacific theatre from 1941-45 and, being a Greg Smith design, it has a dedicated solitaire mode. I’m preparing an unboxing treatment and will probably try to get it to the table very soon.

I also have a couple of GMT unboxing posts in the wings courtesy of their recent Thank You Sale, but I’ll keep them as a surprise. But I’ll offer a clue; one of the games involves livestock, another visits sunnier climes.