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Downfall of Empires is an army level World War I strategy simulation wargame designed with the goal of creating a fluid, historical and fast game.
This is a game with only 4 pages of rules that works perfectly as an introductory wargame, lasts 18 turns, can be played from 2 to 4 players (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Allies and Russia) and can be completed in less than 3 hours.
Each turn, each player has 2 or 3 actions (depending on which side they control) that they can use to move or attack with their armies, build trenches, conduct diplomacy with non-aligned countries, reinforce their armies or secretly develop technologies.
At the end of the game someone will win with most victory points obtained by controlling key areas on the map.
The German and Franco-British Powers have three actions per turn. The Russian and Austro-Hungarian Powers have two actions per turn.
Available actions are:
• Recruit: Create new units or reinforce reduced units to full strength
• Activation: Move units and attack
• Research: Develop new technologies.
• Entrench: Build trenches in an area.
• Diplomacy: Increase markers on the political track to persuade neutral countries to join the war.
• Missions: Create Air missions and Tank missions to help in attacks.
With the exception of Activation, actions can only be played once per turn.
The Recruit action can only be played as the first action.
Conquering enemy cities earns Victory Points, at the end of the game the side/player with most Victory points is the winner.
- Touches on a lot of the historical decisions that all the powers faced
- Fantastic decisions that it involves
- Really good sense of history
- Playable and accessible rule set
- Remarkable game
- Fantastic strategic level introductory war game
- Higher complexity for an introductory game
- Longer game
- Might be difficult to finish the entire war in a single sitting the first time
- Historical decisions faced by powers in World War I
- World War I
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Strategic Level — A 'Strategic level game'.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Access and Allies. So, uh, this is this game doesn't really need any introduction, but I've heard so many good things about it. I think it does meet a lot of the qualifications and criteria that we established as a war game and as an introductory war game for this list. Just haven't had time and made time to play it yet. I think it could have a very high spot on the list.
- David Thompson has been on the list a lot. He makes fantastically accessible war games. So, anything that he creates, I think is a candidate for this list.
- John Butterfield is a fantastic designer and this is a area control.
- John Butterfield designed some just amazing stuff.
- This is a game that might not fit into the classic war game category, but I've heard a number of war gamers say that it's definitely a war game with a lot of war game aspects and it fits probably in that subgenre of games, get the pun, where you are playing the role of a plane or a tank or a submarine or a ship and going over a campaign.
- War at Sea, if you're not familiar with it, it's an area based naval game that dates back to the 1970s, maybe 1980s.
- This is a game set in World War II where you take charge of female Russian pilots. This is based in actual history that run various aircraft missions over the German lines during World War II.
- Worthington does a great job with their production values with games.
- What games did I miss? What games on the list do you like and agree with?