Crisis: 1914

Crisis: 1914 sits beside Congress of Vienna and Churchill: diplomacy, great powers, and that final week before everything goes properly wrong. It takes its history seriously without burying you under the rules weight its subject seems to promise. Underneath is a cheekily light push-your-luck game, a little hand management, and an art style full of aggressively groomed moustaches. It earns its table space before anyone has played a card.

A game lasts six rounds, six weeks of negotiations before the First World War begins. You take one of the nations at the centre of it all, along with its slightly asymmetric deck, and pursue its diplomatic aims. Play cards, use any abilities they carry, and add their diplomatic value to the round’s shared track. You want to finish the week near the top. You also want to avoid pushing past 32 and burning out. These goals do not always get along.

At first, it looks as though a bot flinging cards at random could do much the same job. The special cards and small national rules give you enough to learn, though: what you can threaten, and how your country gets itself killed. More importantly, they make you watch the people across the table; as Germany, I had seen off Austrian provocations and looked certain to win, then gambled on a 66 per cent chance, ran into a Russian provocation, and watched Russia explode from tension on the winners’ podium, handing the round to France, who had apparently spent the whole game kneading croissants.

It is not revolutionary, and it does not pretend to be. With four or five players who already know their countries, understand what they do, and recognise how they can lose, Crisis: 1914 makes for a very enjoyable diplomatic scrap.