"Is Great War a dead issue?" Topic

I went to the online store and didn't see anything except some terrain. Is this a dead line now?

They appear to have a dedicated website:

greatwar.flamesofwar.com

I went to the online store and didn't see anything except some terrain. Is this a dead line now?

Don't know what you're talking about cus' there are plenty of products listed on BF's GW webstore here: link

If anything WWI interest is renewed with Peter Jackson's excellent documentary film 'They Shall Not Grow Old.'

A lot of stores seem to have pulled way back on stocking Flames of War merchandise.

Local store here reports sales across all their games have dried up, but doing a good business in second hand armies.

IMO, they really messed up with the marketing and game design for Great War, and messed up again when they brought Great War up to v4 rules.

Great War is really just the last 12 months or so of the war, nothing before then. It was released in 2014, would have been perfect for releasing 'Race to the Sea' and all the other early WW1 minis (including cavalry). And they didn't. It's all Western Front, too.

How the heck does a game written and designed by Kiwis not have the ANZACs greatest moment, the Gallipoli campaign?

There's no Lawrence of Arabia, either! What the heck?!?

FOW is a tank centered game. WW1 is generally not, except very few scenarios. Alas, they concentrate on these, instead of tackling the tactical problems of trench warfare.

I'm enjoying it.

Don't get me wrong, the core FoW rules work fine in Great War, either v3 or v4.

But the focus on the Western Front is a poor choice. There was far more mobility in the Middle East and the Eastern Front.

And I cannot understand why BF didn't expand the setting with their v4 Great War book. I was really looking forward to sweeping cavalry battles in Galicia!

At the scale represented by FoW, the late war Western Front battles such as Amiens would "sweep" across several tables. Conversely, sweeping cavalry advances (rather than "battles") would never be suitable for 15mm figures. I respectfully recommend the term 'advances' rather than 'battles' because, in the context of cavalry manoeuvres, the latter rarely occurred as we would know it on a wargaming table. Take another example, the two German cavalry divisions on General von Kluck's right flank during the early advance through Belgium and northern France in 1914. The only significant engagements worth modelling with 15mm figures was when the cavalry were engaged at Le Cateau for example, which was a set piece battle, or when there was the equivalent of an on-table set too between German and BEF cavalry in the retreats (BEF retreat to the Marne area and the subsequent German retreat to the Aisne). Sweeping operational-level cavalry manoeuvres have to be represented in a completely different way.

Robert

But the focus on the Western Front is a poor choice. There was far more mobility in the Middle East and the Eastern Front.

I would humbly disagree.

I would argue that the Western Front in 1918 is a perfect period for the Flames of War crowd because this period was the prologue for what you would see in WWII- it was a large and mobile battlefront with modernish armies actually maneuvering against each other with the usual suspects: infantry, armor, artillery, and even air support! That sounds and looks like classic Flames of War fodder.

On the other hand, the periods you mentioned for WWI were mostly infantry slugs with some colonial oddities mixed in. Not really Flames of War's cup of tea.

However if this period goes well then they may do as they did in Team Yankee and expand the game to fit different factions and fronts.