Good Game? #1 - Trench Crusade

I have been trying to ignore Trench Crusade for the last several months, but it’s getting more difficult as it seems to pop up on every social media feed I have (and I have many) and now I’m getting back to social gaming it even seems to be making an impact on my local wargaming scene with a few enthusiastic early adopters.

So instead of ignoring it, I thought it was time to get back in the saddle and take a look at several games that have done a good job of carving themselves a space in the market. A lot of these games come with really nice miniatures ranges, but I refuse to be distracted by such things. Rather, I will be asking a much more important and often overlooked question: are these, in fact, good games?

Now, obviously, whether something is a good game is a highly subjective assessment. And merely being a good game by no means guarantees success or player engagement. But I happen to think that too many miniatures wargamers prioritise the aesthetics of a game over its actual play experience, and as a game’s aesthetic is increasingly its most powerful marketing tool, I want to try to equip wargamers to see past the hype and the vibes to be able to analyse for themselves whether a game is, actually, good.

Along the way, of course, I’ll be giving you my own opinion. But you should always bear in mind that I am, myself, the author and publisher of several speculative miniatures wargames so I am unavoidably biased.

With that said, let’s get to Trench Crusade.

First, it needs to be acknowledged that, for a set of so-called “playest” rules, this is a hefty book. I skipped over the Quickstart rules entirely and went straight for the full-fat, caffeinated version of the rules so I could give you a full and deep analysis of the game. And my poor printer was about ready to give up the ghost by the time we were done. It’s 165 full-colour pages long, with several full-size art pages. Within that, the actual rules are… nine pages long. This is not a complex game.

That doesn’t mean that it’s by any means bad. There are some nice features in there that we’ll get to. But dense it ain’t.

So what’s in the other 155 pages? Well, other than art and colour text, of which there is a not-excessive quantity, it’s mostly army building up to page 130 and, after that, it’s scenarios.

Trench Crusade comes with seven distinct factions, each of which comes with at least two sub-factions, and each of these come with their own special rules which draw upon or modify the core rules. And then there are mercenaries that you can add to your squads under certain circumstances.

This kind of structure for a game will sound very familiar to anyone who plays, well… any mainstream miniatures wargame, basically. It is a structure designed to encourage players to buy one warband but then, well, with just a couple of extra minis you could also have this sub-faction as an option. And it’s always good to have a spare. And you really like the look of this other faction… and before you know it, the game that only needs you to have half a dozen minis to play has latched its hooks into the completionist part of your hobby brain and you’re re-mortgaging the house. This is how Kill Team works. It’s how Infinity works. It’s how Moonstone works. It’s even, on a slightly larger scale, how Bolt Action and Age of Sigmar work. It’s a tried and tested strategy and it should remind us that the game is still just a vehicle to shift miniatures. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, so let’s go back to those eight pages of rules to see what the goodness is.

This is not a How To Play. Go and find someone else doing that. I’m just going to talk about some key features of the game that I think are non-obvious and interesting.

First, the testing mechanic is very straightforward. The game’s core testing mechanic is a 2d6 roll. A roll of 6 or less is a failure. A roll of 7 or more is success. A roll of 12 or more - and we’ll come to how that might be possible in due course - is a critical success!

This isn’t very interesting on its face, but it does mean that the basic odds of success are slightly better than evens, so this is a game that tends towards helping you do things, which I think is a good direction for any game to go in. It’s more fun to do cool stuff than to fail to do cool stuff.

But let’s talk about risky actions.

It’s a skirmish game. You take turns activating one model at a time and that model can then perform actions - move, shoot, fight etc. You can do any actions the model has available to it, in any order and keep going until you’ve run out of actions they can perform. Simple. But if you want to take a risky action you have to take a risky action test, as described previously. If you fail that test, your model’s activation ends immediately.

Again, that’s not a radical innovation but it is interesting. Unsurprisingly, you will usually want to take risky actions last in any activation, which will mean planning your actions one or two activations in advance. But some things you won’t want to do last, like charging. If you charge as your last action, you cede priority to attack to your opponent - unless, of course, they’ve already activated this turn. But if you fail your charge activation you end up falling short of your target, stuck in the open just ready to be gunned down or counter-charged.

This tells us that the game wants to create dramatic moments of peril: not a bad idea for any wargame, but particularly good in one as aesthetically bombastic as Trench Crusade and, yes, I will get to the aesthetics of Trench Crusade in due course, because I’m not entirely about mechanics.

But now, back to the mechanics!

Specifically, +dice and -dice. If you’re familiar with D&D’s mechanics for advantage and disadvantage, these will look familiar. As explained earlier, the normal test is to roll 2d6 and look for a result of 7 or more for success. But if you get a +dice or -dice, you add an extra d6.

With a +dice, you roll 3d6 and pick the two highest for your result. With a -dice, you roll 3d6 and pick the two lowest for your result. And the game allows you to add multiple plus or minus dice based on various factors, and every single test you take will involve working out how many of each any given test is subject to.

Initially, I thought this was a cool mechanic. It messes with the simple odds of a 2d6 in ways that are intuitive, but very hard to calculate precisely on the fly, which I think is a great feature of a good game, because you want players to be thinking “yeah, I reckon I’ve probably got this” more than “well, the odds of success in this case are exactly 21/43rds” - because the former is how your soldier on the battlefield are thinking, whilst the latter… is not.

However, this is one of those areas where actually playing the game will help you know if it’s actually a good mechanic or not. And that’s because of blood markers.

These are probably my least favourite mechanic in the game, along with their functional opposite, blessing markers.

You mark them on a mini by putting a little red dice next to them - or a blue one for blessings. I find this annoying to begin with. But it’s so, so easy for a little dice marker to get knocked onto a different side when moving minis around on terrain that’s anything less than perfectly flat, with neither player confidently remembering what side it was actually on. It also imposes a maximum number of blood markers a mini can have at 6 which, to be honest, isn’t an unreasonable maximum, but it feels like it’s the maximum solely because it uses a d6 rather than for gameplay reasons, and it shuts down the option of some models having more or fewer maximum blood markers.

Blood markers can then be “spent” by an opponent any time a model with a blood marker takes a test, either to impose a -dice per marker spent - and you can spend multiple at once if you wish - or to impose a +dice on an injury roll, in which 7+ is the bad outcome. Initially I was a bit “meh” about this, because it felt like taking away what made the game good - that is, a statistical tendency in favour of doing cool stuff. But, having looked deeper into the army lists and special rules, it looks like your coolest models will already have organic bonuses to their ability to do cool stuff that blood markers will degrade but, generally, not eliminate entirely.

A close second on my “least favourite” list are the rules for injury. They aren’t bad rules, but they take up an entire page to explain in full and, having already established that the basic rules as a whole are only nine pages long, that tells you that the rules for injury might be disproportionately complicated within the game as a whole. What makes them complicated is that you have three states of injury: a minor injury, which just imposes more blood markers; “warrior down”, which imposes both blood markers and additional restrictions on the mode; and Out of Action, which requires very few words to explain: remove model; it dead.

And so far as the rules go, that’s pretty much it. If you’ve played any other miniatures wargame you’ll find the rules, if not familiar, then roughly analogous to anything else you might have played.

But a game’s rules are not the final word in whether they are a good game. And when it comes to Trench Crusade in particular, we need to talk about the vibes.

It has become very much a thing, in the last few years, to market a game on vibes. Warhammer 40,000 has been doing it for decades, obviously, and represents the pinnacle of this kind of marketing to the extent that “grimdark” has become an actual thing separate from the game that spawned the expression. And grimdark is a popular, right now. I’m not sure what we should conclude about the death-spiral of western democratic hegemony, that people are finding an emotional resonance in a narrative based in a distant future where they are ruled by uncaring fascistic technocrats locked into an endless xenophobic war of genocide, but Trench Crusade is unrelentingly grimdark. In Warhammer 40,000 there are moments of levity in what was, at least originally, a satirical setting. Trench Crusade has no time for such nuance.

The full narrative is yet to be articulated by the designers but, broadly, during the Third Crusade, the Knights Templar opened a gate to Hell which unleashed demonic hordes upon the Middle East and initiating a war for human survival has lasted nine hundred years to the present date of 1914. Consequently, Trench Crusade is part medieval fantasy, part steampunk, part Monty Python and the Holy Grail with none of the laughs, part All's Quiet of the Western Front and part Konflikt 47, liberally garnished with supernatural body horror. It is not a coincidence that many of the miniatures currently available could easily find a place as a proxy in a Warhammer 40,000 game. Nor should we find any of this remotely surprising.

The game’s author, Tuomas Pirinen, is a former GW staffer most notably responsible for Mordheim, a gothic horror skirmish game in a post-apocalyptic city-cum-hellscape which bears an at-least-passing resemblance to Trench Crusade. I can easily imagine that Trench Crusade, at least aesthetically, is where Tuomas wanted Mordheim to end up.

And one of the game’s lead artists is Des Hanley, also formerly of the GW art studio, who has a wide portfolio but some of whose most iconic works at GW involved depictions of Chaos-themed body horror that we see replicated again in Trench Crusade.

I think, then, that I’ve established that Trench Crusade is a relentless hymn to grimdarkness at a pitch of hopelessness and horror that would make even Warhammer 40,000 recoil a little and say “bro, that’s a bit much”. But whilst I do like a vibe, when we’re thinking about whether a game is “good” or not, one of my big questions is whether the rules of the game reflect the vibe.

Trench Crusade certainly makes an effort. Blood markers and blessing markers are an example of how they have tried to embed their rules in that grimdark setting. It’s an awkward, slightly forced effort; but it’s an effort nevertheless. When you get into the army lists, this effort expands with not only units receiving names intended to invoke the setting - things like the Artillery Witch and the War Prophet being pretty good examples - but also the associated special rules that include stuff like “Zealous Strength” and “The Holy Water of Lalibela”. Others lean more into the World War One side of the aesthetic, with names like “Satchel Charge”, “Flamethrower” and “Trench Shield” but, of about 60 distinct items of equipment, 47 are objects you would expect to find in any historical wargame.

To be fair to Trench Crusade, though, to find the bolt-action rifle and the greatsword in the same game is very grimdark.

The rest of this book is scenarios, which I’m going to gloss over, because they’re… fine. They draw on the same broad tropes as everything else - part World War trenches, part dark fantasy, part steam-punk. But I’m going to pause at the “Unforeseen Events” from Scenario 8, because I think these are cool. The main rules come with six such events, of which five are nicely grimdark in theme and nature, with “rising fog”, “rat frenzy” and “beast of no man’s land” sitting in the horror category. “Unearthed relics” speaks to the mystical nature of Trench Crusade, whilst “striding mercenary” is embedded in the sense that, although it’s 900 years later, it’s still basically the Middle Ages. The only one that I think is a bit dull is “long lost stash” and I understand why it’s there, but… it’s just a bit out of step with the others. And I think it’s a bit of a shame that they are tucked away in a single scenario, especially when, at the back of the book, there’s a random scenario generator, right there!

And that brings us to the end of the book, so let me share my thoughts.

I know that, for some people, dieselpunk trench warfare and dark medieval fantasy horror is like catnip to their wargaming psyche. If that’s you, you are going to buy these miniatures regardless of how good the game is, and that’s fine. I imagine that this book, when published, will have more art, more lore and lots more photos of minis - right now there is only one picture in the whole book that is a photo of minis on a tabletop. So this book, properly published, is going to be hefty. Expect it to be around 180 pages, all-in, unless they decide to do the Infinity thing and have the lore published separately, which I think would be a mistake.

To the extent that this is a tabletop experience that will hang together without too many confusing edge cases or disputable interactions and give you a decent hour’s play in which you make tactical decisions in pursuit of a relatively well-balanced victory or defeat… yeah. This is fine. It’ll do the job. Tuomas is a competent games author and this is a competently-constructed piece of work.

I don’t think it leans far enough into its own aesthetic, design-wise. The cruelty, madness and pain of the world that is painted for us in the lore doesn’t really articulate itself much in the rules. There are exceptions among the army lists. The Trench Pilgrims have an option for their gothic dreadnought to break one its own allies on a wheel to give it improved survivability, which is properly dark. But I don’t think there’s quite enough of that sort of thing.

The game’s own theme also tends to work against itself in places. It’s called “Trench Crusade” and I completely get that this manages to combine both the modern horror of attritional warfare with the medieval horror of religious genocide. But even though there are trenches in the scenarios, there’s very little sense of this game as being a futile clash of specialists on the edge of a much greater, never-ending meatgrinder of a conflict, which is what is implied in the lore.

But then, Kill Team doesn’t really do that, either. The only way you know that Kill Team is that is because GW has its other games to remind you. Infinity does this better, through its campaigns and special scenarios, so maybe that will be a direction that Trench Crusade can follow in the future.

What could it do better?

I think I would’ve called blood markers “torment” and blessing markers “ecstasy”, and I think I would’ve made them more like a currency that can be acquired and spent in different ways, both positive and negative, so that models could literally die from too much ecstasy or use their own torment as fuel to drive themselves towards victory. And I would certainly have tried to make the rules for injury shorter by pushing more of the consequences of injury into torment and ecstasy.

I understand the use of dice to track blood markers. But I don’t like it. I think it would’ve been more visually appealing to look at a solution more like Battlefleet Gothic, with their debris markers, or Epic 40,000, with their iconic explosive pinning markers. Would either of those solutions have worked perfectly here? No, but given that the miniatures are only available as STLs, it feels like that technology could have contributed better to this feature of the game.

So, no, I don’t really have a better suggestion than dice. They’re cheap, accessible and, so long as you don’t accidentally nudge them, clear to both players. Like I say: I understand why Tuomas went with them I just… wish there were a better way to do it that wasn’t so limiting.

Another feature that needs to be borne in mind when it comes to whether this is a good game is accessibility. This game is 100% digital. If you don’t have a 3d printer, you’re going to have to find a licensor who will print the miniatures for you. This has its benefits to the extent that it reduces international shipping, and it makes the management of stock for the publisher an absolute non-issue, but it could have placed the game largely out of reach for a lot of hobbyists - except that the game is, of course, grimdark gothic steampunk medieval fantasy. And the reality is that you could very easily play this game with a mixture of miniatures from Games Workshop or any one of its umpteen aesthetic emulators. And that’s going to inspire a lot of really interesting conversions and kitbashes that I’ve already started to see leak onto social media.

OK, let’s wrap this up.

Trench Crusade is a good game. It’ll be interesting to see what changes between now and its final form, but it looks like a fun evening’s skirmishing. But I don’t think its mechanics are going to set the world on fire and, given its theming, that seems a tremendous shame.