Boardgame review — Versailles 1919

Peace at Last

Designers: Mark Herman & Geoff Engelstein

Player count: 1-4

Publisher: GMT Games

Right after the Great War, allied powers gathered in France to rearrange the debris left in the wake of that terrible conflict. Part genuine effort to put everything right again and part power grab, the Paris Peace Conference sprawled over six months and produced an extraordinary document that would officially close the books on the first world war.
And buy the globe a 20-year reprieve.

In Versailles 1919, players take on the roles of France, Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom as each nation attempts to make its voice heard, right some wrongs, and generally tug on the rope in its own direction. Diplomacy may be the order of the day, but there are deals to be made at that vast table, and so be it if some regions of the world require one more display of military might.

Far from the hexagonized battlefields, the board represents a lavish conference table, complete with adjoining waiting room, as well as polished charts where players track both the deployment of military units and the happiness level of their respective homes.

At any given time, the conference table houses two issues currently under discussion (say, the fate of Armenia, or whether or not racial equality will be included in the League Charter) as well as the current event card. In the waiting room, three more issues and two additional events bide their time. But not for long.

The object of the game is for each player to shape the post-war world in his nation’s favor. Alliances might come and go when objectives align (and then don’t), but ultimately it’s every nation for itself. On his turn, a player can perform one of two Military Actions:  Deploy a military unit to exert some measure of control over a region of the world in turmoil, which grants certain abilities but lowers the happiness level of a nation who’s had enough of armed conflict; or Demobilize that same unit, which curtails a nation’s physical reach but reassures a grieving homeland (and drives up the always problematic Happiness counter). Whatever the active player decides on the military front, however, he must perform one of three Political Actions: Place Influence on two issues, Settle an Issue, or Reclaim Influence from the exhausted box on the board. Each action is mechanically simple, but also rife with consequences and fruitful—or wasted—opportunities.

Placing influence is straightforward enough: the player drops wooden cubes on two issues of his choice, either on the table, in the waiting room, or a combination of the two. And therein lies the catch: in order to add influence, the player must ensure that he gains absolute majority on both selected issues. Not enough cubes to satisfy that requirement? This action becomes unavailable.

Settling an issue sees the relevant card handed to the player with the most influence cubes on it—which does not always happen to be the active player. The issue’s winner scores the associated victory points and must decide how to settle that issue, picking one out of two or three options. Let’s use the fate of German trade as an example: will it be allowed to flourish, or left to languish in a restricted context? The Open Trade option drops an Industry marker on the card and lowers France’s happiness, while Limited Trade adds a Reparation token to the card, lowers US happiness and increases unrest in Europe. Choose wisely: all of those markers will be worth points at the end of the game, depending on selected scoring cards.

A typical issue, with two options to choose from

After an issue is settled, the event card currently on the table is resolved, causing anything from the retrieval of spent influence cubes to unhappiness for nations with deployed military units. Then, the active player brings a new issue and a new event from the waiting room to the table, and a random crisis is triggered. And let’s face it: most of those crises are uprisings in the making. (More on those later.)

Retrieving influence involves nothing more than taking back a handful of cubes from the exhausted box, along with whatever military units might happen to be waiting there. But the timing of this action—in essence a “skip a turn to come back stronger” move—will often make or break the success of a nation as it tries to control the playing field, and retires for a quick rest when matters cease to concern its interests, if only for a short while.

Uprisings, you say? Very well, let’s get these out of the way.
When an Uprising Check is required, the region under the most stress is subjected to a die roll: the higher the roll (and the higher the unrest in the targeted region), the better the chances of an actual uprising. Military units deployed to checked regions allow for some die roll manipulation: boots on the ground can help push the turmoil pendulum in one direction or another. Should an uprising actually come to pass, the player holding the most issues pertaining to the affected region loses the issue worth the most VPs: that issue is unsettled and goes back to the table. (This represents the issue being brought up and debated once more.) Players bid military units and influence cubes, with the highest bidder assuming (or reassuming) control of the issue at hand, and then deciding its fate anew, hopefully scoring a few much needed markers.

This strange waltz keeps on until the Game End issue card shows up, heralding the game’s imminent conclusion. As soon as that particular issue is brought to the table, and a player decides to settle it, the game is over.

Then, a combination of scoring cards and relevant markers, happiness levels, own flags proudly displayed on won issues, and point values on issue cards themselves determine each nation’s final score. Whoever records the highest number in his log leaves the table a victor.

WAR PRODUCTION

Versailles 1919 comes with a mounted six-panel board, and a host of counters to represent the variety of outcomes settling an issue one way or another might generate. Issues are represented by beautiful tarot-size cards, while events reside in a regular deck of equally adorned cards. Wooden cubes for influence points, wooden discs for military units—some of the game’s understated material belies the forces unleashed through the drawn-out negotiations.

Also in the box sits a scoring pad that seems to take up a lot of space: indeed, scoring a four-player game where each participant is required to add seven numbers feels like it shouldn’t invade an entire letter-sized sheet of paper. (I ended up creating my own compact scoring sheet.) As of this writing, GMT was unfortunately not providing a printable scoring sheet on their website—a temporary situation, to be sure.

GMT games are usually overflowing with dense player aids, whereas Versailles 1919 features but one, devoted to explaining extra steps involved in solo play. Otherwise, the rules of the game are so straightforward that a summary fits snuggly on two-sided reminder cards distributed to all players.

Some minor mistakes made their way onto a handful of cards, and while those are no game-breakers by any means, GMT is having the culprits reprinted and will make them available for free to customers who have purchased Versailles 1919.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

The game only needs 14 pages of rules; add a couple more for two-player and solo instructions. As short as the rulebook stands, it does a fine job teaching the game, in a style that both flows as a learning tool and clicks as a reference manual.

Learning how to play Versailles 1919 requires a single reading of those rules, and explaining it no longer than 15 minutes. Its inner workings are so easy to grasp, in fact, that new players will furrow their brows and smile to themselves when, at the end of the short lesson, you proclaim “that’s it!” and get the game started. Surely it can’t be that simple, right?
Well, the truth is wearing vertical stripes to make it look thinner.

You see, while Versailles 1919 certainly runs on a very simple engine, things quickly become tangled. A lot. Not so much that you would fail to see the entire tree of ramifications for each of your possible actions—but ramifications there are, and it’s not unusual for them to reach surprising depths.

It’s a real treat to see the slow-motion trap ensnare fresh victims as new players engage with the game for the first time. The first few turns make it all feel like you’ll be mindlessly sprinkling the board with influence cubes… and then, when those cubes become scarce, knots tighten and players start to realize their fates are entwined. How much can you pull on an opponent’s thread without unraveling your own tapestry?

In addition to designer notes and a nice historical commentary (I love that stuff), the thick playbook provided with Versailles 1919 also sports two detailed examples of play: one for the multiplayer game, and another for the solo affair. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned examples are peppered with mistakes that make learning from those pages a tricky proposition. GMT announced that corrected documents would soon be available to download from gmtgames.com.

FUN FACTOR

While Versailles 1919 reads and looks like a cerebral endeavor, a battle of wits, the game creates a visceral tension you can only experience in playing through an actual game. The simple, thin layers of complexity do stack up, and before too long you find yourself wondering if you should get even more involved than you already are in the fate of the Balkans, or perhaps turn instead your attention towards Europe. After all, the populace is much more tranquil there. For now, anyway…

When uprisings start blowing up various parts of the globe, navigating the repercussions turns into a fascinating chess match. Impose order and your homeland will hate you for it, but let things degenerate and you might end up one of the casualties. In some cases, blaming another nation in order to steer most of the chaos their way could be the best course of action—especially if you can scoop up one of their previously settled issues and fashion it to fit your own needs.

Because of the clever way they are designed, end-game scoring cards encourage players to collaborate, or at the very least leave each other be, for however long that fragile marriage of convenience might last. For instance, if France holds a scoring card worth 1 victory point for each Empire marker (of any nation) in play, it might let the UK get away with a few choice moves, as long as it puts some UK Empire markers on the table and provides France with some precious victory points.

What’s more, each game invariably ends too early. A couple more turns, and you would have had the world just where you wanted it, with your allies playing the exact roles you needed them to. Oh well. At 90 minutes a pop (perhaps all the way up to 180 with a campaign game), why be content with just one go at it?

PARTING SHOTS

As expected with a game of this type, you don’t need a full complement of players to enjoy Versailles 1919. But where other concoctions might devolve into tasteless versions of themselves at lower player counts, this brew loses no flavor. Quite the contrary, in fact.

The standard game plays with three or four players. All regular rules apply, compromises are rampant, and game end shows up faster than an electricity bill in January.

What happens with only two opponents? One player handles France and the other the UK, but each also gets to play an action as the USA at the end of his turn. So France will play his own turn and then an action for the USA, followed by the UK playing his own turn and then an action for the USA, and so on. This peculiar arrangement gives rise to tactics that don’t exist with a table full of negotiators. One player will often perform a counterintuitive USA action because it leaves no American way out for the opponent, or else spend his turn building up for a long-term goal that would normally leave him open to a flanking attack—only to use the USA action to reinforce that very flank.

No opponent handy for a game tonight? No problem. Borrowing from Herman’s own Peloponnesian War, solo V1919 requires one player to split his time between France, the USA and the UK, in a variation where nation victory points become Strength Points. The player starts in the driver’s seat of one nation, while very simple bots handle the other two. When the player’s turn starts, he scores one “player” victory point if the nation he’s playing currently shows more Strength Points than its two adversaries. But whenever an issue is unsettled, the player is forced to assume the role of the straggler—the nation with the lowest strength. Remember, you only score a victory point if the nation you’re playing has the most Strength Points when your turn begins. So while you’re striving to maintain your current nation in the lead, you must always keep things more or less balanced and make sure that the other two negotiators are just a step behind; otherwise, you’ll spend too many precious turns catching up with your feeble nation once you’re forced to sit on the other side of the table. Victory is achieved by scoring 20 points by the time the game ends.

I think I still prefer the 4-player version, for the sheer brinkmanship gleaming around the table with a full roster of opponents. But I’m having a lot of fun with Versailles 1919 at all player counts, and I marvel at the fact that those variations feel so different (and yet so connected) that it’s almost like having three games in one box.

As much as I was impressed with the system introduced in Herman’s Churchill, I vastly prefer this simplified (and quite distinctive) version and would be thrilled if future entries in the Great Statesmen series followed in Versailles 1919’s footsteps.

 

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