"Great War versus Through the Mud and Blood" Topic

Can anyone comment on how these rules compare?

TGW is more traditional, with players taking turns and different phases for moving or shooting, and many different stats for making units different. Basic units are platoons, with around 12 individually based miniatures each. Armies are built with a points system, and the lists cover German, British and French battalions during 1914 and 1918 (not in between). The rules are simple and very well explained, with lots of examples and pictures. There's also many different generic scenarios and some historical articles. It's one of the best looking rulebooks I've seen.

M&B is quite different: the scale is about 1:1 and all the game revolves around junior officers and NCOs. When they're not around, men will just look for cover and defend themselves. The game uses "hidden" units and random activation to simulate friction and "fog of war", so coordinating a handful of units is sometimes a challenge. I've played half a dozen games and I think it's brilliant: it's fun, fairly simple and as realistic as pushing lead toys can be. The book is well written but it has no army lists, points system or scenarios. However at the end it has some really good articles covering the different tactics and platoon organizations through the war. There's also a scenario supplement covering the whole war.

I think that they're very different games, but I'd choose M&B unless you really like WH40K, tournament games or having lots of tanks and heavy guns on the table.

1:1 scale must make scenery building a challenge!

Not only that imrael, but painting the figures takes forever.

I believe Pentaro meant the figure ratio was 1:1, the scale/figure size can be what ever you want, 6mm up through 54mm.

great war is for battalion level games, where each player handle one battalion (near one hundred minis).

mud & blood is for company level games or lower. they say in the ruleset that you can handle as many as one hundred minis per side, too, as a maximum. that´s very close to a company

but as each mini is a real soldier, you´ll have very diferent roles for each mini: rifleman, close combat soldier, etc…

I am still paiting my armies for mud & blood, so I havent played it yet, but it looks very interesting.

about "great war", i like the scale, i would like to play wwi at that scale, but the rules system is so flavorless, that you could use it for wwii

by the way, toofatlardies has a mud&blood scenario´s suplement. you can play with as few as 20 minis per side.

I have both rule sets and play both. I enjoy both. Both give such a different style of game and have a different approach that its hard to compare like for like, so considering the costs of the rule books I would suggest buy both, and with my heavily biased hat on, then suggest buy them both from us at scarab please(grin)

The M and B supplement ghostdog mentions is a pdf download only available from toofatlardies and is worth every penny you pay, regardless of which game system you play. Its jammed packed with good scenrios and information and for WHW Great War players in particular the scenerios are easy to convert with little or no effort.
I hope a bit of that frothing helped. If you live in the UK I am organising a Great War gaming day for both rule sets later in the year, details will appear in due course but check the scarab forum for some pics and a report of a previous event at Gripping Beast

the great war rules were written as a 1 to 1 rule set, but games workshop decided at the last minute to make it a battalion level game so the author only changed the scale from 1 to 1 to 1 to 3, but it still plays as 1 to 1 for casuality removeal. platoons are really squads ,ect.

I've just bought Mud and Blood and Stout Hearts and Iron Troopers and am very impressed with the research that has gone into the production. The first few senarios deal with infantry tactics at platoon level and teach you how to handle your troops. Excellent stuff

I've recently bought both. As I'm building the trench table. I like Great War in that it is based on 40k so I know the rules basically. I still am a little bit hessitant to paint two 100 man armies. I've basically decided that not only do I have to paint my army, I have to paint the opposition.

I like skirmish games, but with a large trench table underworks, doing a real WWI game makes sense. I may do the French Canadian scenario from Too Fat Lardies summer special which I also bought. That seems less than 100 models aside. I'd need to make more roads and buildings too match the historical terrain but I'm all for making terrain next year. Then I'll just host games and force people to do what I want. ;-)

Alas I'd have to referee both for a while until the rules are well learned.

I have M@B and like the afv rules, I,m planning on using them for RCW and Very british civil war

I use M&B for my WWI gaming and my group and I like the system. I would not go over a company per side for a game though. Even at that size it can get a little hard to handle. We usually use a platoon or two per side and the games run quickly.
I've never used Great War or read them so I can't comment on them.