Versailles 1919: a wargame about peace?

A continuation of wargaming by other means

The noted military theorist von Clauswitz is most famous for having written that, “War is merely the continuation of policy with other means.” Or something like that. We more often see him quoted as having said that, “War is the continuation of diplomacy [or politics] by other means,” but “policy” or “state policy” seems to be the more accurate, if less vivid, translation. But whatever. We know what meant. Or we think we know what he meant.

It seems that this eggheaded Prussian veteran of the Napoleonic Wars wanted us to think of war not as a discrete phenomenon, but as part of a continuum of possible actions by which nations pursue their goals. Whether you come with fire and sword or a bunch of flowers, it’s all about getting over on rival nations. For those of us who care about gaming as well as history, it also gives us a useful way of understanding GMT Games’ Versailles 1919, which I recently had the pleasure of playing for the first time.

Versailles 1919 is co-designed by Mark Herman, who cut his teeth on hex-and-counter wargames with SPI during its heyday and who designed and published some classics of the genre with Victory Games. As co-designer of the Great Battles of History series with Richard Berg, he continued to demonstrate mastery of what is by now the conventional form of wargaming. At the same time, however, he experimented with form and single-handedly invented the card-driven game, a sub-genre that uses point-to-point movement and action/event cards to regulate player actions. More recently, he has been experimenting with games that focused on diplomatic and political conflict, including Churchill, which simulates the tension simmering beneath the Allied war effort in World War II as the United States, Great Britain and the USSR all tried to shape the post-war world at the others’ expense even as they combined forces against the Axis powers.

Rather similar to Churchill, Versailles 1919 describes a conflict between putative allies that plays out in conference rooms instead of battlefields as the victors of World War I jostle each other to dictate the shape of the post-war world. If you have read Margaret MacMillan’s definitive and brilliantly readable history of the sausage-making that went into the Versailles Treaty, Paris 1919, the game makes the most sense with three players, each one representing France, Great Britain or the United States. It also fits four players, with the fourth representing much-aggrieved Italy (“Treaty of London? What Treaty of London?”).

The core mechanic has each player bid from a limited pool of influence markers to control a series of Issue Cards, each of which represents a key issue on which the Great Powers were expected to set the world to rights. Some represent the comprehensive, yet insanely detailed questions of how to redraw the borders of the post-war world, while others represent broader social and ideological issues like the international labor movement or Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. If you win the bidding, you can choose the consequences of that Issue Card and you will get victory points for it. As a bonus, you get back half of the influence markers you bid for possible reuse on your next turn (all others get discarded). However, you don’t necessarily control when the bidding ends, and that’s where the game gets particularly tricky.

Versailles 1919 does not divide into discrete game turns in the conventional sense. Instead, players act in turn, choosing one among the following actions: bidding on up to two Issue Cards; recovering discarded influence markers for reuse; or choosing to end bidding on an eligible Issue Card and immediately resolve its effects. Note that this last option may involve allowing another player to win that Issue Card — perhaps you need to free up the influence markers you’ve committed to it, or perhaps it’s just your least bad option at the moment. The winner then takes that Issue Card and either chooses from the top two Issue Cards from the deck to replace it (discarding the other) or chooses the top card from the discarded Issue Cards. This cycle continues until the End Game card (randomly shuffled into the last 20 cards of the Issue Deck during setup) is drawn, signifying the last player-turn.

Winning Issue Cards grants you victory points. You also get victory points based on your nation’s Happiness level — i.e., how much your domestic constituency approves of your diplomatic efforts in Versailles. Total them up after the last player-turn to determine who emerged from the grueling Paris Conference with the most influence over the post-war settlement.

There are also secondary mechanics that can affect your decision making. When you resolve an Issue Card, you may have the chance to destabilize one or more regions of the world (representing resentment by various peoples and minor nations against how the Big Three have decided their fate); if a region goes into open revolt, all Issue Cards that have been resolved are discarded and the players that won them lose their victory points. Event Cards represent individuals who came to some played their part in the events of the day, from the celebrated pianist-turned-Polish Prime Minister Ignace Jan Paderewski to Ho Chi Minh, who came to the Paris Conference as a young student to lobby for Vietnamese independence (without success, of course). The next Event Card is always placed face-up on the board so everyone knows what’s coming when it is resolved, and it is resolved immediately after an Issue Card is resolved.

Somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t find the mechanics of Versailles 1919 all that difficult to master. For all its abstraction — and a game of diplomatic conflict is bound to involved a lot of abstraction — it’s not a complicated game. The turn sequence moves quickly and experienced players can probably finish it inside of a couple of hours, especially if the End Game Card comes up early.

It probably helps if you have read Paris 1919, too. Not only will you recognize many of the individuals mentioned on the Event Cards, but you will have an instinctive grasp of the diplomatic struggle that the game simulates. Prof. MacMillan describes the Paris Conference as a collaboration between allied nations in only the most polite and facile sense. It was really a three-cornered struggle between frenemies — the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (who survived an assassin’s bullet during the Paris Conference), the American President Woodrow Wilson (who suffered a stroke after the Paris Conference) and the British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George (who didn’t remain Prime Minister for long after the conference) — over who would get over on the other two. If you have read her book, playing Versailles 1919 will conjure visions of those three worthies bickering with other, sniping each other behind their backs, crawling on hands and knees in their striped trousers and waistcoats in a Paris hotel, examining vast maps of Europe as they decide whether a village should belong to Poland, Czechoslovakia or Germany when that map is redrawn. I have read Paris 1919 and reread it, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the turbulent history of the last century (I may review it for the blog, in fact). Versailles 1919 is the perfect companion to it — although, given how much I enjoyed playing the game, one might also say that MacMillan’s book is the perfect companion to it.

To bring all of this back to where I started, however, let me conclude by thinking aloud: Games like Churchill and Versailles 1919, pitched as they are to wargamers, expand our notion of how to define a historical wargame just as von Clausewitz challenges us to think of war as part of a larger continuum of state action. There are no combat ratios, no unit movement allowances and costs for terrain, no combat results tables, no rules for overrun and zones of control. You don’t have to worry about paths of retreat and supply. But it is very much a simulation of state conflict — of war carried on by other means in pursuit of national goals. If more games like this are published (and I can think of others that I don’t have the chance to mention here), perhaps we will have to find a more inclusive name for the genre to include non-kinetic conflict. “Conflict simulations,” anyone? I suppose John Krantz, who founded the popular historical wargaming forum ConsimWorld, might go for that. “Historical games?” That might work, although it could bump up confusingly against 18xx train games and the like, as well as history-themed Euro games like Wallenstein. Well, we can work on it. I’ll admit that I enjoyed Versailles 1919 enough to set aside such meta-questions. Only later did I bother to wonder, “What did I just play?”