"Need rules to play 1914 battles in France" Topic

Hey All,
looking to do big battles in 1914. Smallest unit a battalion.
Any suggestions? Need to scale up with 4 players per side.

1914 by Great Escape Games should be exactly what you need: greatescapegames.co.uk/1914

I own them and read through but haven't played them. That being said, I like what I see in them quite a bit. I typically use a one-sheet set of quickplay rules I was given by the GM of a convention game.

link

Do consider Square Bashing.
Above is a rule system summary.
Play sheets et al l can be downloaded for free; which is nice.

Each foot unit is a battalion.
Each player controls a division.
It has a ground scale, points system and multi criteria victory conditions.

Good luck with your search

Four players per side no problem, but I suggest you double the normal army size.
They have been published and popular since 2012.
There is a very nice army book too.

martin

Very few rules for WW1 work well for the early campaigns or theatres where trenches are uncommon.

Bloody Picnic was our choice but we did need to 'reinterpret' some of the rules to better fit France/Belgium 1914.

Tried Square Bashing during covid – not our cup of tea at all. Very much a 'buckets of dice' game with saving throws and other similar ideas that make it very luck dependant.

Great War Spearhead is a possibility but tends to allow players to ignore real unit organisation, which we didn't feel happy with. Playable, but not really what we wanted.

Not sure if Bloody Big Battles will be having a WW1 version any time soon but that is mostly Brigade sized units, or even larger.

You know my pick… Great War Spearhead 2.

Command Decision: Test of Battle, even has a supporting scenario book.

going a few years back: Over the Top (Command Decision 1.5) also included 1914 scenarios

We've experienced good games from this period using GEG's 1914 mentioned above but found as the games got larger play time extended as more time was required to allocate command tokens. Another set of rules we've successfully played early Great War games with is From Shako to coal Scuttle by Nordic Weasel Games, they are a very useful multi era set of rules.

Great War Spearhead, elements are companies, manouvre units are brigades.

An alternative would be Square Bashing, which also uses company sized bases.

"Not sure if Bloody Big Battles will be having a WW1 version any time soon but that is mostly Brigade sized units, or even larger"

You can use BBB as is for early WW1, Chris and his group already do. I did a version of Fire and Fury for 1914, which worked OK.

If you really want to just manouvre battalions, then just bump it down a scale, but personally I'm quite happy to group stands into battalions within a manouvre brigade.

Great War – Wargame Rules for the Opening Months of the First World War by Fred Haub and Terry Sirk. Clearly it was designed for the early portion of the war. Just so that you know it was written in the 80s and is the style of rules from that era.

kallistra has a set for their 12 mm figures. hexbased, and free.

That would be "Raging Empires".

I don't know of any Great War rules that focus on the battalion as the smallest unit on table. As you check out the various suggestions, here are some links to After Action Reports on 1914 scenarios.

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And a fictitious scenario featuring Denmark and Germany:

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Robert