Tried Cataclysm: A Second World War yesterday. I thought I remembered Tom reviewing this, but I can’t find the article anywhere.
Well, we “tried” in the sense we parsed the (30 page) rulebook, spent half an hour setting up, and another 90 minutes going through a single turn. This thing is Twilight Imperium level of commitment, where it’s a requirement for everyone to read the rules ahead of time and set aside an entire day (4-10 hours).
So it’s an economic/diplomatic/war WWII grand strategy game. The twist is that it starts in 1930, when the name of the game is diplomatic developments and the conversion from a peaceful to wartime economy. War production and offensives become easier the higher level of war readiness your economy gets, but you get increasing penalties to internal unrest checks that could lead to the collapse of your government, which you have to offset with more and more effort spent to keeping the propaganda train going. You can even push your economy to a final “exhausted” state which makes costs and offensives even lower, but permanently lowers the maximum size of your military, a last ditch effort as your nation starts throwing cheap designs, synthetic fuels, and child soldiers into the fray.
So it mostly becomes a tightrope act as the Axis and Russians balance keeping up peaceful pretenses while trying to time when and how often they switch into higher gear. The democracies (US/UK/France) are severely limited in actions until the other players begin turning on the war machine, sort of like the forces of good in War of the Ring. The “baddies” have to decide if ramping up right now is worth the increased alarm from the West (Japan even starts off receiving extra production from U.S. scrap metal & oil shipments which get cut off as they become aggressive).
I could see this being a very interesting system, but good god does it demand commitment. It is NOT simple or intuitive (like Twilight Imperium 4ed. quickly becomes). It’s one of those games where one person is constantly asking “what’s the rule for…” while another flips through the 30 page rules trying to find the answer. It makes a lot of design fumbles for ease of play like no well designed individual player aid sheets (there are some, but they’re very hard to understand unless you already know the rules). The worst is that several essential to know nation conditions are all kept track of on a single separate sheet, not on your own. Want to know your own nation’s stability level? Alliances? THE CURRENT TURN? None of this is on your sheet or even on the board. Crane your neck and peer over the table as you squint to find your marker on the small, hard to read spaces of the separate sheet that keeps track of all this.
There are crazy rules about adjacency, supply lines, special one time historical powers for each nations, FIVE different kinds of attacks and half a dozen die modifiers for each one, and so on. I was getting BAD Hitler’s Reich flashbacks trying to make sense of them. It definitely looks better than the mess of HR once you learn it, but the hurdle is just as big, if not bigger.
On the plus side it’s fairly cheap (chits + paper sheet board) for usually under $50. You do need one damn committed group of 3 (other player variants look lame and tacked on) if you’re going to go at it though.