I want to strongly recommend the board-game "To the Last Man!" by Nuts! Publishing link
This is an exceptional theater level game of the Western Front from World War I. It covers the whole 1914-1918 period, and can be extended to 1919. The games basic unit is the corps, with the Army being the highest level of organization. The map uses area movement. Card play is central to the system and is used to represent advantages in doctrine, planning, and logistic. Battle is straightforward but provides many important decision nodes. In general it is a game that has a healthy combination of luck and decision. And oh my the decisions are beautiful and create tense game! Will you sacrifice cards to soak losses, opening the danger that you could find your hand with no cards, while your foe still has enough to move? Will you pass, tempting your foe to spend cards for activation and thus to empty his hand faster, but also making it likely a crucial seasonal turn will end if they also pass? Will you go on the offensive or hunker down waiting or major reinforcements later down the way?
The beauty if the game is that it is more a module rather than a straight-jacket. You can play the Western Front in any way you want. You can play scenarios beginning in each year of the war, plus 1919. You could decide to just play a game focused on only one year. You could tie the hands of the players more towards the historical actions, or give them full reign to create their own WWI. You can play the historical war-plans (determining deployment and initial hands) or try 5 other German, and 5 other French war-plans created between 1875 and 1914. Indeed you could randomly choose warplanes as well. Battles are decided by buckets of d6 dice, but there is the option to use average dice and thus throw out the level of luck brought by dice, or use d12 dice for a more normal distribution of chance. You can ass as much or as less complexity as you want to the game.
And all this is still playable in one day at most. We have played single years (1914, 1915) in 2-4 hours. We have also played the whole war 1914-1919 in 8 hours, with food break. It truly is a great design. It is not perfect. Luck can make your life really hard (though there are optional rules to temper that). That said it is not impossible to survive a turn of bad luck as long as you are careful.
And the game is so tense and emotional! It truly makes you make interesting and harsh choices. And the choices have consequences.
It also has fidelity to history. If the Germans do not win the war in 1914, their chances of winning the war later are very slim. If 1914 ends in a stalemate, the allies will have to work hard 1915-1919 to turn the war into a Entente victory. The most likely result in the long game is stalemate or a marginal victory for one or the other side. Once entrenchments and fortifications become common place it takes 3-4 turns for 2-3 armies to overcome 1 army in the defense. Tanks (representing theater level concentrations) and Stormtroopers can have operational impact, while biplanes (representing theater level concentrations) play a secondary role. Artillery is important, but in the end it is the Infantry Corps that will win or lose the war.
Finally, the creator made a free aftermath module. This tells you what the likely political history would be of the level of victory attained by the winner, deepening on the year it was attained this. This small thing makes playing the game more meaningful. Victory or defeat know have specific political consequences. There is an epilogue in another name. Sometimes when playing Germany, I have decided to surrender in late 1914 when it is clear I did not win the war, simply because I prefer the world created by Marginal German Defeat in 1914, then the world created by a German or Allied victory, or stalemate in 1919. A pity for the millions that the historical leaders did not know this.
A truly outstanding game.
