The World Crisis Interview: Bruce Harper

The World Crisis is a grand strategy game which uses many of the gaming systems developed for A World at War and its prequel games Gathering Storm and Storm Over Asia. It simulates the military, economic, political, diplomatic, research, and production aspects of the First World War and lets the players find out for themselves what might have happened

The rules and images shown here are not final.

You can find it in P500

Tell us a little about yourself. How did you get started in the hobby?

I always played board games as a child, and one year my brother and I got Avalon Hill’s Blitzkrieg for Christmas. After that, I alternated between strategy games and tournament chess.

In between, I became a lawyer and worked as a prosecutor.

In 1980, I wrote a long letter with many questions about the original Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, and one of my suggestions was incorporated into the game. It was downhill from there… A year or two later, I was asked by Avalon Hill to take charge of Q&A for Third Reich, and this led to writing much-needed rule clarifications, then rule changes, then Advanced Third Reich, Empire of the Rising Sun, and finally, with GMT, A World at War.

The prequel games Gathering Storm and Storm Over Asia followed in 2015 and 2020, respectively.

Where did you get the idea to make the game?

I think the challenge came from others, but also from myself, because designing an interesting game about World War I is, on the face of it, nearly impossible. After all, the war seems, in retrospect, largely senseless.

However, I also thought Storm Over Asia couldn’t work, while others were equally skeptical of Gathering Storm.

I used to play Avalon Hill’s Guns of August and, before that, 1914, and while neither game really succeeded, I felt that if a strategic World War I game worked, it could be very interesting.

Will the mechanics be the same as in previous games? What changes can we expect?

Some of the mechanics are the same, but in more refined forms. For example, the economics of World Crisis are entirely based on activity counters, a concept introduced in Gathering Storm and also used in Storm Over Asia. But in those games, tile points were spent to use activity counters; in World Crisis, you just use them – they are the currency of the game.

This approach has a big benefit – there is no bookkeeping, other than for research. For A World at War players, who are used to tracking Basic Resource Points, this will come as a shock, but probably a welcome one. It certainly makes the game simpler.

The mapboard and units in World Crisis will be recognized by A World at War players, and the concealment of ground units by army counters closely resembles the use of task force counters in A World at War. But the combat system is quite different.

 

Similarly, Storm Over Asia players will feel comfortable tracking cohesion levels for each major power in World Crisis, but there are also important differences in how cohesion is modified.

There are also random events, as in Gathering Storm and Storm Over Asia. Making the most of these is definitely an acquired skill.

So there are many things that will be familiar to people who played the other games, but also many things that will be different. World Crisis is simpler than the other games, but not because it is less challenging – it’s more than the concepts from the other games are being used in a purer form, without exceptions that aren’t worth including in a World War I game.

It’s hard to estimate the playing time at this point, but I would think maybe a day or two.

Can you give us some clues about the "alternative lines" that may arise during the game?

This is very difficult to assess at this point. Unlike in some other World War I games, World Crisis players are free to try whatever they want, with the main constraint being that it might not work. Just as in the related games, you can try something different, but don’t blame the designer if you get crushed.

Germany can try to go after Russia first, while Austria-Hungary can avoid its historical mistakes from 1914 (while probably making different ones). Is it better to attack, increasing cohesion, or to defend, to reduce casualties? Which front should Germany emphasize? How important are the secondary fronts? I really don’t know the answers to these questions. I never do a game intending it to be a puzzle to be solved (although some players take that approach), and ideally there is no “solution” as such. The “best” strategy will depend on what you are good at, what your opponent does, and chance.