1914: Glory’s End / When Eagles Fight is published by GMT Games and designed by Ted Raicer. This is two full games in one box, one for the Western Front and one for the East, both revised editions of the campaign games Raicer originally created for the late lamented Command magazine before he went on to Paths of Glory and The Great War in Europe. If you want the opening moves of the Great War on both fronts, this single package covers an enormous amount of ground.
1914: Glory’s End covers the first three months in the West, from the Guns of August through to First Ypres, as Imperial Germany gambled everything on knocking France out in six weeks. Units are mostly corps of four steps, with a few especially strong or weak brigades and divisions plus counters for the feared Krupp and Skoda guns, and the rules handle forts, cavalry, command and control breakdowns, supply, strategic rail movement, Allied sea movement, German forced marching, and Plan XVII while staying very playable. The campaign runs a full 30 turns, with a Marne mini-scenario and a shorter ten turn campaign also included.
When Eagles Fight, a Charles S. Roberts Award winner, takes us to the Eastern Front from Tannenberg to the revolution that brought down Tsar Nicholas II, with low complexity rules covering German heavy artillery, the OberOst and Stavka headquarters, Russian ammunition shortages, fortifications, the slow Russian mobilization, Austrian lock-step planning, and the Brusilov Offensive. There is even a what-if scenario assuming an initial German concentration in the east in August 1914.
The Great War is one of my favorite periods to game, and Raicer is one of the designers who shaped how most of us approach it. If you know his Paths of Glory, which has appeared on the blog many times, these two designs show a very different and much more operational side of the same conflict.
Below I am presenting the game components, giving also a quick overview of the rules and key design features:
Enjoy the material!