Versailles 1919

I am not Mark Herman’s biggest fan: I often find his wargames a little dry, and Churchill did not exactly thrill me either. Still, I greatly appreciate his attempts to make political wargames outside the familiar COIN/CDG formula. Versailles 1919 had caught my eye as far back as its P500 days, because it seemed to take Churchill’s broad concept and push it where, for me, it needed to go: into a serious negotiation game with a much better abstraction engine than that other game’s fake war.

Here I represent one of the nations at the Treaty of Versailles — America, the United Kingdom, France, or Italy — and, essentially, I am fighting to manage my political influence. Through a continuing budding mechanism, I try to win the issues brought to the conference table. Nobody should be intimidated by the complexity 6 printed on the box: this is an exceptionally breezy GMT game, not some rules monster.

The interaction, however, is anything but breezy. Historical personalities create problems and often destabilize particular spheres of geopolitical influence — Venizelos in the Balkans, for instance — while the players negotiate, clash, and stab one another in the back to get through what benefits them. It has honest-to-goodness spite, backstabbing, and those tense table moments I want from a diplomacy game.

Overall, I found it immensely enjoyable, with theme and mechanisms exceptionally well tied together in my mind. The balance between historicity and game balance probably tilts toward the former — alas, poor Italy — but in a game that is a negotiation game at its core, that simply becomes part of the “cost of diplomacy,” provided everybody knows it beforehand. The end-game scoring disappointed me; it felt completely all over the place, and the experience is not nearly as interesting with fewer than four players. Thankfully, Triumvir is due to come along at some point and rescue that part of the deal.