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War Bonds: Battle of the Somme's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Did it build on the Havoc Engine and add interesting stuff? | #2 | 4.700 | 4.700 |
| Overall | #10 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Did it make good use of the Havoc Engine? | #12 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Does the game seem fun to play? | #38 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Before even opening the book, I was a big fan of the title. The double meaning establishes a note of world-weary irony that prepares the reader well for what's inside.
What we have here is almost a board game with roleplaying elements, though the roleplaying is foregrounded and there's no real "win condition" (poetic!) You've created a really interesting structure on top of the Havoc ruleset, and the concept you're pushing toward of a GM-less game with two "teams" of players interacting is even more fascinating. I think it works well to communicate the encounter between the human interiority and social connections of the soldier on the ground and the almost gamified nature of modern warfare. It's complex, but I think condensing all of the information onto cards does a lot to help make the rules more legible and the modularity of the squads and objectives more manageable, as does the excellent extended play example provided. The orders deck does a good job of reifying the nonsensical and contradictory orders given by out-of-touch generals far from the front, and the fog of war mechanic piece by piece revealing hazards and the true objective is really cool and unique. The "trench gong" promotions are also an excellent flavour inclusion. I think players will have to be in a very particular mood to be interested in an experience where the game ends in mass slaughter and your soldiers just straight-up die if you roll a one, but I'm certain there's tables for that and I admire your commitment to unflinching honesty. It's similar to what I was trying to do with my game, though mine is a bit more amped-up action movie rather than All Quiet on the Western Front: The Game.
I'm not experienced with VTTs so I haven't got around to looking at that part. I can imagine a lot of players would find it a relief, but I'm old-school enough to still prefer playing with physical cards and I could see a full boxed release of this game making a real splash on the table. I'm impressed!
VTT is finished enough for testing! Check it out HERE
I'm a really big fan of what you've done here. There aren't too many ttrpgs centered around small unit tactics but this executes on that premise so elegantly. The lethal 1s mechanic is a perfect way to convey the random brutality of its subject matter and giving the player the ability to buy out of it with successes (that they really need elsewhere) is a mechanically interesting way to push the players into throwing bodies at the problem like a bonafide World War 1 General while keeping them on the hook for their actions.
The cards are a great way to add randomization and replayability while keeping the cognitive load to run the thing pretty low and manageable.
As a document the game is really well explained, which is highly appreciated given how many departures it takes from a baseline havoc engine game. I don't often see examples of play written into game jam games but they're a great way convey how the whole thing works in motion.
Overall a lot of very cool ideas, this seems like it'd make for a very unique mini-campaign, or would a great set of mechanics to tinker into an XCOM hack or something like that.
Thank you so much for the kind words! I definitely envision a larger version of this that allows it to be a GMless system and either both sides have an oracle style orders system, or perhaps two entirely separate players issue orders devoid of the context of the players in the trenches.
I was able to finish making the physically printable card versions. Going to take a few more days to finish the VTT, but my hope is to finish that later this week.
https://silly-little-guy-llc.itch.io/war-bonds-battle-of-the-somme/devlog/1478118/cards-uploaded
nice production and good to see more WW1 games. Looks like it will play well and be pretty grim as the setting is. Be interesting to add some of the horror elements of EtR or other dark horror in the trenches.
I actually wanted to avoid the supernatural elements and go with more grounded version. The vision I have for a more expanded version of the game is sort of an inverted war game. No GM running the game but soldiers receiving either truly random orders from above or potentially from two other players not at the table and forced to watch their brothers in arms fall around them while they have more in common with the enemy than those giving them their orders.
Wet Ink Games already has a pretty solid lock on the supernatural WW1 genre with their Never Going Home series so I figured I’d just pivot out of that entirely!
Oh this sounds like it'd be absolutely horrifying in the best ways, looking forward to reading this!
As another commenter mentioned, using the Havoc Engine objective system to represent the fog of war is a sharp choice and helps sell the grittier, more grounded fiction you're gunning for here compared to Eat the Reich. I think your other mechanical choices support that fiction well, with the lethality die slowing the crawl towards each objective being a standout choice towards achieving the senseless hostility and slogging pace of trench warfare.
The visual design choices definitely help sell the fiction, but I found large blocks of typewriter text a little difficult to read at times. I'm definitely interested to see the VTT stuff you've set up when the links are ready to fire!
Yeah I ran out of time to add the additional graphics and things the book really needed.
One month is always so much faster than it seems like and writing (and layout) is always a little slower than we'd like lol
For starters, the presentation is fantastic. The scope is also impressive. The card system seems pretty well thought out and I'd absolutely be interested in giving it a shot. Building the Havoc Engine objective system into a fog of war card that gets progressively revealed is both thematically interesting and feels like it would allow for this to be replayed several times showing the different ways war can play out.
Implementing the "lethal" roll to demonstrate the brutality of war is a great idea. It goes against the grain of the havoc engine's premise that you play as larger than life killers by making your characters replaceable, but that helps to drive the theme. I do wonder if that impacts your ability to connect with a specific character and roleplay their emotions and actions, but I think adding the Regroup actions/cards helps to alleviate that issue. I wonder if it would make sense to have a Mourn regroup action (or a subaction contained in Gossip) in which the characters can acknowledge those killed in the previous battle phase.
Another bit that I really liked was the "trench gong" promotions. What a great way to work in a bit of history into a mechanical element of the game.
As a final note, the choice to make this a game about struggling to achieve seemingly random objective passed down from on high, rather than giving the players a discreet objective to accomplish and all the tools they need to get it done is definitely thematically appropriate and interesting. I really enjoyed reading through the document and would be happy to give it a try sometime.
Thanks! I agree about the mourning. In my rush to try and get the whole thing put together I didn’t include the two spotlights I intended to include. One was a reroll mechanic called bad dream where if the results were particularly bad, you could narrate your whole squad brutally dying and then have a soldier wake up in a panic so you could redraw your orders. The other though was for when a soldier’s whole squad gets wiped out and the other squads would raise a toast remembering the fallen from the squad. The player who lost their whole squad would then get to recreate a new squad with some upgrades and such.
I’m hoping to finish all the cards and the VTT before the end of the week and I’m planning on trying to do playtests on the RRD Discord playtest sessions. We decided to keep the Tuesday session.
The links to print cards don't appear to work in the pdf
Thaaat would be because I haven’t been able to finish posting them yet. There will be a new version of the book shortly.
I was finally able to get the cards put together in a printable format. Still got some more work to do on the VTT.
https://silly-little-guy-llc.itch.io/war-bonds-battle-of-the-somme/devlog/1478118/cards-uploaded