"Best Rules for Early War, 1914 and 1915" Topic

Want to do this in 15mm so I can have more room for bigger battles.

Crush the Kaiser. Google them.

Great War Spearhead is a good set of rules. Scenario books are out too.

Depends on what you mean by big.. I am a GWSH fan, because the rules allow me to play divisional and corp level games. I also love the mechanisms that give me a feel for battles at that scale. Played a game with an experienced SH player new to GWSH a few weeks ago. At the end he commented "that FELT like a WW1 game"

Hopefully that helps with your decision.
Kind regards
Robin

As above Great War Spearhead for division or corps sized battles. Larger ones I use OP14 by Richard Brooks which has battalion stands but might be a little abstract for some.

Phil Barkers Horse, Foot and Guns covers 1914 at a similar scale as does the V&B 1914 variant.

Square Bashing from Peter Pig. There's some great AARs on TMP if you have a search.

For very much the same reasons as Robin mentioned, I like Great War Spearhead II. I've yet to try the rules with a trench warfare scenario- although it looks like it handles it well – but they give a great feel for the war of maneurer of 1914-early15

Alan
They handle the trench scenarios really well too.. here is an AAR of a 1915 game we played a few years ago:

link

R

Greg Novak's Over The Top, which is Command Decision for WW1. OOP, but there are still copies out there in the distribution system.

Thanks guys, a lot more variety than I thought. I have "The Death of Glory" which are the 1914 scenarios for "CD, Test of Battle." I just bought it for the scenarios but haven't decided on rules yet.

What I mean by more room for bigger battles, is that 28mm figs are great. But they and the terrain takes up a lot of table space when compared to 15mm. I can fit more of a battle on my game table. Thanks again everyone!

I would recommend Peter Pig Square Bashing. These rules work really well for 1914 I have played many games using early war Germans/French and BEF. The basic game is about divisional size – about twelve foot battalions five guns and five machine guns. The games are built around attack and defence – the attacker need to get stuck in (plan 17 for the French). The use of squares means no measurement is required and the use of assets (will the barrage I have called for arrive, will it fall short – gulp).

The rule system is easy to pick up and if you are looking to adapt real actions to the table to this is easily done – I have played Mons on a number of occasions.

Another vote for Square Bashing, I have played early and late war and they include trench set ups, canal crossings and the use of armoured trains. They have a campaign system and a game finishes in 2-3 hours. Army lists are available for all the major participants and for all the years of the war

Square Bashing is quite good, and plays very well.

It is very "british" in the sense that everything has its own rules and nothing works the same, but it covers almost every piece fo fluff you can think of, it has a nice setup sequence which helps you get into the feeling of a big battle, and the army lists are nice.

Another vote for GWSH. 1 company is represented by a single stand of 3-4 figures in 15mm, which allows you to play Divisional level games and there's a couple of very good scenario books for 1914-15 available.

'Square Bashing' works to the same sort of scale but is VERY abstract compared to most other rule sets – you'll either love or hate them.

Rallynow, thank you for the extra background. 'The Death of Glory' scenarios are specific to a ruleset that was adapted directly from a WW2 set. This makes it easy to transfer experience from the latter to the WW1 variant but the ground scales don't work so well for WW1-specific rules. Aside from the Test of Battle WW1 variant, which would be your best bet for playing the scenarios, the other ruleset that covers brigade-size games is Crush the Kaiser. I don't know CtK well but I suspect the ground scale will be different.

Robert