1812

Tim C has been working on a design for our next participation game, this time covering the 1812 campaign in Russia. It was worked up enough for a playtest at the club.

This is designed to be one of our fast games, 10-20 minutes at most, for a single player and all the components need to be easily transportable.

A suitable sized box for putting the whole thing in.

Fundamentally it involves the Grand Armee marching to Moscow and back again, having various adventures on the way. Movement is regulated by areas, with cards (here represented with scraps of paper)  with various exciting things happening. Turns are roughly monthly.

The key concept in the design is dealing with the strategic consumption which decimated the army both on the approach and the retreat. The army starts off huge and wastes away alarmingly quickly.

The basic mechanisms seemed to work fine and much of the discussion centered on how to model the key decisions the French had to make, in particular choices of march routes and how long to wait in Moscow (assuming they get there at all). I think we came up with some decent ideas, so hopefully we've done enough to come up with a more polished design and the build of some proper components. Watch this space!