MacGowan & Lombardy’s The Great War was completely funded on Kickstarter and will ship in April 2021

Further refinements have been made since this playtest. Click here to go to a report that links to the latest rules, overview & card samples, examples of play, and quickplay rules.

Based on player feedback at Consimworld Expo 2019 we made some important changes to the World War One card game.

Here is a brief overview of what we changed –

1) We kept a color border on the card back only for the Random Events deck (orange) since these cards never go into a player’s hand.

2) All other deck colors (new Bonus deck yellow, red/blue core decks, and white additional-optional deck) are now on the card fronts. They appear as a broad, wide diagonal stripe across the middle of each card. This enables quick sorting but won’t tell your opponent what you are holding in your hand.

3) We changed most naval cards to BLOCKADE cards (Allied surface ships and German submarines). They still have low battle points. Now they have a bigger impact on the game. If a blockade card is still in play at the end of a turn, it cancels and discards any one enemy Nationality card. This reflects the blockade’s long term logistical effects. Naval cards cannot help capture army or aviation cards – instead they remove them from play. Chris Janiec suggested these revised rules. Chis is a US Navy veteran and designer of PQ17 published by GMT. We will credit him as naval rules developer.

4) A turn winner cannot place high value aces, kings, queens, and jacks back into their hand. Nor can they be voluntarily discarded. This would enable a player to avoid their capture by the enemy. These cards now show their battle point (BP) values as white numbers inside a black circle.

5) We now consider Heavy Machine-Gun (HMG) cards as another type of infantry. Therefore, cards that link to infantry now also link to HMG. This text fix appears on all appropriate cards.

6) All mortars and howitzers now include the word “artillery” so their card type is clear. Field guns are now called field artillery.

7) We have added dates to the new white deck cards. For example, all USA cards now have 1918 on them.

8) The number of cards a player may have in their hand increased from 8 to 9.

9) Dana is working on a game overview with designer’s notes and player tips. These, and the new four levels of victory, will appear on the back of the new version of the Quick Play Outline.

These changes slightly shortened the amount of rules text.

Click here to download a PDF of the latest rules (4.7) and sample cards.