WW2 Quartermaster General – 2nd Edition

If you ever wondered what would be the result if Diplomacy and Risk! got together and produced a love child, then wonder no more for it is Quartermaster General WW2! Particularly if you throw in some card drafting for good measure. Now this isn’t meant as a criticism as both these venerable games have had huge sales but not without some criticism of their flaws. Does Quartermaster General WW2 cure these issues whilst bringing out the best of its’ genitors? Well we will see.

Six Nations Championship

Quartermaster General WW2 requires you to play the 6 key protagonists of WWII : Germany, UK, Japan, Russia, Italy and the US in every game, regardless of how many players are playing. If there is not 6 you have to double or triple up. There is a printed table detailing who does what from player counts of 2 through 6 (Bizarrely on the box art it says it’s for 2 to 5 players!) Whicever way it’s sliced the contest is between the Axis forces: Germany, Italy and Japan and the Allies: UK, Russia and the US. Each country is played as a separate hand but their VPs are aggregrated. These VPs are marked on a track around the board and if at the end of any complete turn of the full 6 Nations one team is 30 points ahead of the other victory is declared. Alternatively the game ends at the end of 20 turns in favour of the team with the most VPs.

Each complete turn of the game has the 6 nations taking their own turn in the order : Germany, UK, Japan, Russia, italy and the US. Each of their turns has 5 steps :-

1. Play Step – You play one card from your hand
2. Supply Step – Remove any of your unsupplied pieces
3. Victory Step – Collect Victory Points for your team
4. Discard Step – Discard additional cards if you want
5. Draw Step – Draw your hand back up to 7 cards

Play is controlled by your deck of cards. Each nation has their own tailored deck of from 30 to 41 cards. You are dealt 10 to begin with from which you choose 7 to keep.

Crucially the range of cards on offer to each nation difffers to give them distinct styles of play. Some may not even have any of one type of card. Simarily the pieces that represent the Armies and Navies available vary from nation to nation, both in their total and their split between the two classes.

Sharp Cards

There are 8 types of cards in Quartermaster General. In the Play Card Step you will get to play just 1 card. With the first 6 types : Build Army; Build Navy; Land Battle; Sea Battle; Economic Warfare and Event! You play and enact the effect immediately. The other 2 types Status! And Response! Require you to play them in one turn, face up for Status! Face down for Response! and they then can take effect in any subsequent turn.

Build Army! and Build Navy! Allow you to place a piece on a supplied area. You can’t have more than 1 piece of your own in an area, which is just as well because you don’t have many pieces. These never move (except under one particular Event! card) and you can’t build where an enemy is present.

The two types of Battle! card refer to the area that is being attacked rather than the attacking unit. Here you will remove 1 enemy piece. There is no random luck element or saving throw it’s just gone – unless there is a Response! card to save it. Note the attacker does not move into the vacated area but has to wait for another turn to Build! in there.

Economic Warfare! cards whittle down the nation’s draw deck. There is no reshuffling of a deck once exhausted. Indeed not only will you then be restricted in what you can do but you will also start to lose VPs. This reflects the weariness of a nation as their resources run out and their reduced capacity to wage warfare effectively. It does tend to make the later stages of the game a bit dull though!

Events! are various buffs that you can play, mostly for your own benefit but sometimes for your Allies. It’s worth noting that there are not enough Build! cards in your deck to bring on all your pieces so some have to be brought on by Event! cards.

Status! and Response! cards, as previously noted, have to be played on the table in an earlier turn to have an effect. Status! cards will remain throughout the game and can give their effect each turn that their conditions are met. Response! cards are one-shots, once enacted they are removed from play.

Supplies! Supplies!

Great emphasis is made in the game of always keeping your troops in supply but in truth this is quite easy as you have relatively few pieces to deal with. The lack of randomness in combat is an advance on Risk! for me and reminded me of Diplomacy though lack of movement of the pieces took some getting used to. Said pieces were also a reminder of Diplomacy and that is not a compliment! They could have been a bit more inspiring. The choice of the nations colours was a bit odd, too, in some cases. The imperial purple of Rome for Italy is OK, I guess, but I’ve never seen British forces in yellow before and beige for Japan seems very dull.

I enjoyed playing Quartermaster General WW2 and will play again as you do feel every game will be different. It is not though hugely exciting. You have too few pieces to sweep around the world in magnificent manoeuvres and when you can see your way to doing something you can be frustrated by lack of the right cards. The designers have taken some steps to address these issues in this, the 2nd edition and there are expansions to the system as well. (One of these “Total War” I’ll review separately).