Guns of August

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

Guns of August was reportedly in development for a very long time, and it shows.  But not in a good way.  Everything about this game is an unwelcome blast from the past, from the horrible nonstandard interface, to the almost nonexistent manual, and  the seemingly endless sequence of undocumented, largely meaningless phases that clog up every turn of the game until, as all good lemons should, this game crashes at the start of 1915, just a few years short of the finish line.

I was frankly dubious about the strategic possibilities of WWI.  It's been a long time since I've played the Avalon Hill board game of the same name, & didn't think much of it then.  More recently I've also played the much, much better GMT board game Paths of Glory, but I suspect that a lot of the pleasure to be had from that game comes from its carefully crafted game mechanics rather than the fidelity with which those mechanics recreate the war.  Even so, I was willing to gamble on Guns of August.  As it turns out, I lost.

Game play

The game play in GoA could easily be described as ponderous, even deliberately obstinate or obscurantist, so I am being generous in the extreme in awarding it a zero rather than a lemon on this score.

The problem is principally one of phases.  Lots and lots of phases.  Almost everything has its own phase, and things can only ever be carried out at that one point which can never be returned to if it's accidentally missed. No back button.  No real documentation.  No fun at all.

This phase mania is even taken to the extent that when you start the game you start in an empty phase which seems to only exist to add yet another phase to the many you'll encounter.  Phases that do nothing at all, a gaming first.  Advance one phase. Again and again.

Allocating command points to HQs happens in a separate phase to declaring offensive, which is separate to plotting them, and on it goes.  All for no obvious reason other than perhaps to catch the unwary player who has forgotten to buy the points that will allow his navy to leave port, or forgotten to declare war to order an to attack. [Typo fixed - Dec 2008.] Things that happen in the same turn, and before the enemy can intervene are meaninglessly split up.  And none of this is documented at all other than (at most) to say that a phase exists.  There isn't even a chart showing what happens when.

This is a shame, because some of the game's mechanics show real promise, especially the way a lack of command points can nicely simulate the the inability all the powers had at different times in the war to get their acts together and take advantage of opportunities that lay open to them. (Think of the Germans at the height of the St Michael's offensive, or the Russians at the start of the war.)  Buying command points, allocating them to HQs and spending them could easily happen in the one phase instead of three.  Taking this one step further, everything could happen in the one phase, in whatever order the player got around to it, just like it does in SSG games.

Nuts & bolts

The paltry manual doesn't just fail to cover game play.  Documenting a stock standard Windows interface in the way this game's highly idiosyncratic interface is documented might be ok,  that's why standards exist after all.  But this game seems to date from a time when Windows 95 was new & just what a right mouse click could be expected to do was open to some debate.  That was then, and this most certainly is now.

The problem with all of this is that no simple patch is going to fix this collection of ills. The turn sequence is presumably buried deep in the code, and whatever efforts were used to put the awful manual together were presumably all that Matrix had to spare. I don't hold out much hope that this game is going to be fixed any time soon, though if the end of year crash is ever fixed it might at least progress from being simply unplayable to simply not worth playing.  Maybe it'll be better than that, it's hard to come up with positive things to say about a game that doesn't work.

To play the game on Vista you need to run it in XP compatibility mode.  This won't help you survive past 1914 as the game also crashes at that point in XP, but it'll get you that far.

To add insult to injury, or perhaps bad coding to bad design, after the end of year crash the game no longer recognizes your serial number & needs to be reinstalled.  So far I haven't felt the need.