La Der des Ders: The War to End War – First Impressions (Hexasim)

Some wargames ask you for a whole weekend. La Der des Ders: The War to End War asks you for an evening, and gives you the entire First World War in return. I sat down with Janek for one complete game, from the opening moves of 1914 through to the collapse of 1918, and we were finished in well under three hours. I commanded the Entente, Janek took the Central Powers.

The game is designed by Arnauld Della Siega, with graphic design by Marc von Martial, and published by Hexasim. As always we will follow the proven track: first the game overview, then the session report opening with a bit of historical background, and finally my thoughts. Enjoy the read!

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Game Overview

La Der des Ders is a strategic level look at the Great War for one or two players, running somewhere between 120 and 180 minutes (but can finish early). One game turn equals four months of real time, and there are up to fourteen turns covering 1914 to 1919 – unless of course the war is decided earlier. There is also a dedicated solitaire mode with a bot called Athena, driven by a small deck of Cornflower cards.

The map is deliberately schematic. Instead of hexes and divisions you get Sectors – France, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Romania, Greece, the Middle East and Africa on my side, shaded blue; Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria and the German Colonies on Janek’s, shaded green. British and Belgian forces are folded into the French Sector, which tells you immediately how much abstraction the designer was willing to accept. An inset in the bottom left corner handles the colonial war in Africa.

Every Sector carries its own Collapse Track, and this single row of boxes does an enormous amount of work. The yellow circle on the left is the Production Value, the number of Resource Points that Sector generates each turn while it is at war. The descending numbers along the track are the Operational Value, which caps how many Resource Points you may commit to an Offensive launched from there. The die face at the right end is the Attack Value, the number you need to roll to score a hit. Losses push the cube to the right, reinforcements pull it back to the left, and when a cube runs off the end of its track that nation is finished. Morale, economy and fighting strength, all in one line.

Offensives run along the red arrows printed between adjacent Sectors. Each Sector may launch one Offensive per turn, though it may be attacked by several enemies in the same turn, each resolved separately. You commit Resource Points up to the Operational Value, roll your Attack dice plus any Artillery dice your technology has earned you, and push the defender down his track. The arrow is then covered by a marker so everyone can see what has already been spent.

The other half of the game is the Technology Phase. Each side has its own tree with six columns – Attack, Defence, Artillery, Aviation, Naval and Air Raid – and each level becomes available only from a given year. An attempt costs 1 Resource Point and a die roll, and here comes the clever part: you may spend extra Resource Points for a +1 each, and a failed attempt leaves a research cube in the box that grants +1 to every later try. So you are never simply unlucky, you are only ever early. Unlocking a level is not the end of it either – you then pay again to implement it in each individual Sector.

Around all that sit the supporting systems: two Trade Tracks feeding extra resources to each side, the Naval Control Table where the U-Boote campaign is set against the Blockade, the Russian Revolution Track creeping forward every time Russia takes reinforcements, and a deck of Event cards that drags the historical narrative onto the board whether you want it or not.

Session Report

As usual in my First Impressions I will share both what happened on the board and what I took away from it. One full game, the complete war, Janek as the Central Powers and myself as the Entente.

Enjoy the report! PS. Remember you can expand each picture on click.

Historical background

The war the game models is the one that nobody planned for. The German strategy of 1914 assumed a quick decision in the west followed by a turn against Russia; instead the front froze from the Channel to Switzerland and stayed there for four years, while in the east the war stayed mobile but never conclusive. What followed was not a campaign but an industrial competition – shells, manpower, food, shipping and inventions. Italy joined the Entente in 1915, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers the same year, Romania came in for the Entente in 1916 and was overrun within months, and the Ottoman Empire stretched the fighting from Gallipoli to Mesopotamia.

1916 was the year of the two great attrition battles, Verdun and the Somme, both of which cost the attacker almost as much as the defender. 1917 brought the Russian Revolution and the American declaration of war, and 1918 brought the German spring offensives, their exhaustion, and then a collapse that came from the flanks rather than the center: Bulgaria signed an armistice in September, the Ottomans in October, Austria-Hungary in early November, and Germany on the eleventh. And running underneath all of it, from the spring of 1918, an influenza pandemic that would eventually kill more people than the shells did. Every one of those threads has a counter or a card in this box.

Session report

Janek opened exactly as a Central Powers player should: a heavy, sustained push east against Russia. Turn after turn the Resource Points went into offensives on that front, and my Russian cube kept sliding to the right. The uncomfortable part is that Russia is the Sector where you cannot simply pour reinforcements back in, because every reinforcement (potentially, dice-roll dependent) advances the Russian Revolution marker. Keep the front alive and you accelerate the revolution; let the front go and you lose the Sector anyway.

The whole board early on, with the “watch marker” still at the far left of the turn track. Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece all sit under NEUTRAL discs, waiting for the right Event card to pull them in. My blue cubes and Janek’s green ones have each moved a space or two down their Collapse Tracks already, the Resource Track along the bottom shows what we had left to spend, and the red tray on the right is full of Offensive markers.

I survived it. Not elegantly, but I survived it, and that turned out to be the whole point. Every Resource Point Janek spent breaking Russia was a Resource Point that did not go into technology or into propping up his southern partners, and by the time the eastern front had burned itself out I had a tech tree he equal to Central Powers and and it started to only get better for me.

A closer look at the main theatre. The white Offensive markers have been dropped onto the red arrows between Germany and Russia and on the French border – one Offensive per Sector per turn, and once the arrow is covered that route is spent. This is the phase where Janek was pushing everything he had eastwards.

Then came my counterattack, and it went in the south-east rather than the west. Austria-Hungary was the weak link, and once its Collapse Track started moving there was no realistic way for Janek to reinforce it and hold Germany together at the same time. Vienna went first. The Ottomans followed. It is a genuinely satisfying feeling to watch an alliance come apart one Sector at a time, and it is exactly how the real 1918 went – the Central Powers did not break in France, they broke on the edges.

It was not one-sided. In the middle of all this I lost Romania, which came into the war on my side and was gone again more or less immediately, precisely as happened historically. And the west was doing what the west does in this period.

1916, and both of the year’s main Event cards landed on the table. Battle of Verdun forces Germany to attack France with every Attack die it can muster; Battle of the Somme forces France to do the same to Germany, with a +1 on the dice. In both cases the losses inflicted are also suffered by the attacker. Two cards, and the entire grinding character of 1916 is sitting on the map.

Those two cards are worth pausing on, because they are a lovely piece of design. You do not choose to fight Verdun or the Somme. The card tells you that you must, with everything available, and then charges you for the privilege by handing you your own casualties back. The mutual bleeding of 1916 is not modeled with a special attrition subsystem; it is modeled by taking the decision away from you.

Meanwhile I kept feeding the technology tree, which by the late turns had become genuinely lopsided in my favor.

My Entente Technology Tree late in the game, and this is where a very large share of my Resource Points went. This is wonderful part of design and the possibility to mitigate luck (although by paying for it) is a great idea.

And then the war was decided by something neither of us could plan for.

The card that ended our war. Spanish Flu moves every Sector one space forward on its Collapse Track, with an exception of two spaces for France and Germany. You can see the result on the two tracks it hit hardest: my French cube has run out of track, and Janek’s German cube is sitting on the very last box.

One card, drawn in 1918, applied to both of us equally, and it fell on the side that happened to be one box further along. France went out. Germany was standing on the last box of its own track with a single step left. If the flu had arrived a turn later, or if I had spent two more Resource Points on reinforcements instead of on a technology roll somewhere in 1917, we would be talking about a different result.

The final position. White flag markers sit on Austria-Hungary, on Romania and on the Ottoman Empire, which is most of the story of the game in one glance – and it still was not enough. The Unified Command card in the middle, giving France +1 to all its Attack dice until the end of the game, had arrived just a little too late to matter.

Summary: Janek took it, and by the thinnest margin the system can produce. I had dismantled two of his three major partners, he had spent his whole early game on a front that did not break me, and the war still ended with my strongest Sector going over the edge one step before his did. What I liked about it is that neither of us felt bad abou tit. The Spanish Flu is in the deck, everybody knows it is in the deck, and the player who is closer to the edge when it comes out is the player who made the choices that put him there.

First Impressions

One session is one session, but this is a game that shows you almost everything it has in a single play. Here is what stayed with me:

• The entire war in two to three hours. This is the headline and it deserves to be. There are excellent strategic treatments of the First World War, and most of them want a full day or a campaign commitment. Here you sit down after dinner and you finish the war. That changes what the game is for – it becomes something you can actually get to the table on a weekday evening, and something you can replay next week to test a different approach.
• The Events genuinely reshape each game. Which minor powers come in, when they come in, whether Verdun and the Somme land in the same year, when the Russian Revolution bites, when the flu arrives – none of that is fixed. The historical narrative is pushed onto you rather than chosen by you, which is the right way round for this war, and it means two games of La Der des Ders will not follow the same shape.
• The technology trees are a highlight, and asymmetric to a useful degree. Both sides have the same six columns, but they do not mean the same thing to each side. Air Raid only really works for the Central Powers, the Entente has to unlock Naval before it can even use the Naval Control roll, and the availability years mean the two sides reach the same tier at different moments. Investing simply to avoid falling behind is a real and slightly miserable decision, in a good way.
• All those dice add up to a balanced kind of randomness. This is the point I would most want to make to anyone put off by the sight of a dice cup. You roll a lot, and across a whole game the variance flattens out. More importantly, you are allowed to buy probability: every extra Resource Point on a technology attempt is a +1, every failed attempt leaves a cube that helps the next one, and every Offensive lets you decide how much you are willing to commit. The dice are a cost curve, not a coin flip.
• The Collapse Track carries the whole design. One row of boxes gives you production, offensive capacity, defensive resilience and national morale simultaneously. It is the kind of compression that looks obvious once somebody has done it, and it is why the game can be this short without feeling thin.

Two things will not suit everybody. The first is the level of abstraction. There are no armies here, no fronts to maneuver, no ground to take – a Sector is a number on a track, and an Offensive is a decision about how many Resource Points to spend. If what you want from a Great War game is the shape of the Western Front, this will feel too much like a machine and not enough like a map. The second is the sheer number of die rolls, particularly during the Technology Phase, which can feel repetitive when you are working six columns at once and rolling for each of them. Neither bothered me, but I can easily imagine both bothering somebody at my table.

All told, this is a small box that does something quite ambitious and does it in an evening. It is going back to the table, and the solitaire mode with Athena is the next thing I want to try.

See you in another report!