Guns of August (Adanac Command Studies/Matrix Games) is a rare example of how to capture the seemingly uncapturable. Making a good game about World War I requires a design that forces the player to accept stasis on some fronts as a matter of course. It means creating rules that limit how much progress the player can make in a turn without making the player angry that he can’t make more progress in a turn. The Eastern front can have wild and crazy fronts because of the expanse; the West needs to make every hex count. Otherwise it’s not really WWI.

Consider the number of war and strategy games that sell themselves on how they will let you do everything. More units, more research options, tactical minigames under a strategy layer, etc. The philosophy of interesting decisions has often been interpreted to mean lots of little ones, not a few big ones. That’s where Guns of August differs. It takes a central board game conceit – limitation – and sells it.

We often forget that limiting the number of actions in a board game is fundamental to making the game run smoothly. Since a board game is designed to be played both with other people and in a reasonable amount of time, you can’t have players doing every possible action more than a couple of times per turn at most – less is better. You’ll be there forever. So by using a deck of cards, or allocating action points, or using attrition, you can quickly move the turn on to the next person, keeping everyone involved. You want short turns where every action matters, not long turns where people have time to read the rulebook and realize that you’ve been doing it wrong for the last two hours.

There’s no reason for computer games to be like that. Auto-calculation means that turns move very quickly, there are pretty lights to distract people, and PBEM moves with a rhythm all its own. But for some settings, limiting actions proves to be essential to getting the right feel. And the stop-and-start of the First World War proves to be such a setting.

In Guns of August, the first few 1914 turns are full of action. Your headquarters (to which troops are tied) have lots of activation opportunities and the Central Powers can push hard against Belgium and Serbia and France and Russia. But as the weeks drag on, these activation opportunities deplete. You might have time for a single major offensive on each front. The other hexes might get an artillery barrage, maybe with some mustard gas for that added pop, but you can’t do everything everywhere. This isn’t Operational Art of War where you pause an attack to get supply; you pause an attack in Guns of August because you have to choose between taking Liege or stopping the Cossacks. This sort of limitation repeats itself in research, diplomacy, naval orders, recruitment, etc. It’s all about carefully spending scarce resources when everything looks so appetizing. This is what makes it a strategy game more than a war game.

The other big board gamey thing is the rule book. You will need to read and re-read it before a lot of stuff become clear. How does research work? How does the naval interface work? Why can’t I launch a diplomatic overture to Italy? Depending on the screen or menu, the interface veers from functional to appalling. (Part of the reason this mini-review is so late is because it took me a while to find the time to comprehensively learn what the hell I was doing.) The buttons are too small with too small text and no menu has any explanation for what does what.

Guns of August, for me, ends up in some sort of netherworld of journalistic recommendation. Is it a good game that rewards the attention of careful readers and planners, or is it merely a good World War I game once you get past all the interface crap? Can you celebrate a game for its great board gamey feel and then complain that the computerized interface is 10 years behind the times? Since I did just that for Armageddon Empires, it would be stingy to change the rules for Guns, but then AE is self-published and constantly being tweaked.

I’ll say this. It is one of the most satisfying original games to come out of Matrix in the past year. There is a lot of great stuff in this game, and I hope to say more about how it treats history and diplomacy in coming weeks.