The boardgame industry in the UK is very much a cottage industry and UK Board wargames industry is a cottage industry within a cottage industry.Being a loyal Brit and wanting to support my local wargamers Ive bought a couple of wargames as soon as they ve come off the press relatively unseen.
With Where There Is Discord: War in the South Atlantic, I was spoilt and stunned by the quality of the game and gameplay but with another labour of love game Trenchzone (TZ) would I be as impressed ?
Introduction
TZ is a Light 2 player wargame based on Trench warfare in World War one.Players control either the blue side (vaguely British looking pieces) or the Red Side (vaguely German). Each side must try and capture a section of an enemy trench while holding onto their own trench. Using Gas attacks, machine gun fire, Artillery , Barbed Wire and a plethora of cards - which include Sappers, extra Artillery, Engineers, Typhoid and Trench foot (my personal favourite) to name a few - to achieve their aim.
Components
TZ comes in a 'bookcase game' sized box (the older wargamers will know what that means). Its has excellent art on its cover , and the box card its worth saying, is quite thick (along the lines of the New Twilight Struggle Deluxe Box) and unlike some other games, wont split along the edge if you put anything as heavy as a pencil on it (Im talking to you MMP - excellent games flimsy boxes).
There is a fine A4 colour rulebook (and its in colour not color because its British !) 16 pages long, with plenty of pictures and illustrated examples of play.
Some 90 cards , nicely illustrated with photographs from the era. The cards look good but the cardstock feels a little on the thin side but durable enough.
The pieces are, in the case of squads , nice 1" sq pieces of reasonable heft , not as thick as in "Where there is discord" or a random FFG token but neither are they paper thin. The illustration on the pieces is thematic but hard to distinquish but with the only important information the number of squads being easy to read.
The board itself and the player aid are pleasingly mounted. The Graphics on the board are ok, a deep muddy brown with slightly cartoony barbed wire positions and trenches but entirely functional.
Overall are the components are of good quality (except the thin plastic dice ! but C&CA was notorious for having rubbish dice and it did ok).
Rules
After an initial good impression , I started to read the rules and problems immediately arose Although many facets of the rules are well illustrated with some nice examples there are sections which are confusing. The overall impression is that at times the designer is assuming we are know what he means without being clear as to what he precisly intends. 993
Simple example , for the setup he suggests you may like to have a hidden set up, but if you dont want a hidden setup no alternative is offered. In fact there is no real reason not to have a hidden setup so why not make it mandatory.
Despite all this the designer has been incredibly supportive and responsive to my many queries. At the end of the day this game isnt Paths of Glory or Case Blue and a bit of common sense and the occasional house rule fixes the odd problem without wrecking the game.
Gameplay
So how does it actually play and why call this piece Memoir 1914 ? It is a card driven or rather a card assisted game (strictly speaking you could win the game without ever playing a card but this is extremely unlikely and rather pointless). The Designer notes Memoir 44 as a inspiration/influence. It has some similarities (3 avenues of attack, actions initiated by card play, a common deck , an element of hand management, amongst a few) . But also lot of differences and some innovation.
The victory conditions are two fold either demoralise the enemy by achieving enough victory points by such actions as assaulting enemy Trenches , destroying enemy artillery or wiping his troops out as they cross no mans land for example. Or capturing one of the 3 sections of the enemy's Trench which is an auto-victory.
To achieve this during each turn you will roll a lot and I mean a lot of dice at the enemy , dice phobes turn away now. On the first round for example with your Off/On Board artillery and your 6 pillboxes you will be rolling 24 dice and that is before you play any cards which may bring in more MG's or Artillery. As your forces get degraded and Pillboxes/MG nests are blown up you wont be rolling that many dice but then you wont have that many targets either. 993