Ypres Salient: A soldier's life during the great war

What was life like for the millions of professional, conscripted or recruited soldiers, who fought in the Ypres salient during the great war? The trench experience involved the terror of mud, slime and disease and the constant threat of shellfire. Heavy artillery and new weapons such as poison gas and machine guns threatened death from afar; but hand to hand combat with clubs and knives killed many during the grisly business of trench raids. When troops were not fighting, they were locked into trench deadlock, at which point boredom also became a serious issue. Luckily there where the letters from home and regular behind the lines periods to keep the soldiers going.

This game, or rather simulation, lets you lead your character(s) through the great war. It’s very uncertain that a soldier who starts at the beginning of the war will make it until November 11,1918 but maybe he is lucky. Best is to take into account that this game will make you have several soldiers who will at a certain moment during the war get killed in the field, die of wounds, get wounded but rejoin their unit, get a wound that will get them home as a cripple, have them hospitalized with health problems from which they maybe recover but equally have a chance to be send home; unfit for further duty. Finaly there are mental problems like shell shock in the game. A soldier has the chance to get fit for duty after a while or be send home to a mental institute but there is also a chance that he will be threatened as a coward who is unwilling to serve. In that case he will end before the firing squad.

This is a role playing game for 1 to six players where you build the stories of soldiers around Ypres by using cards, tables and some sheets. Let your imagination create their lives and death while in Flanders fields. Like real life soldiers you for your character will have almost no influence on it. But you have some topics that you can get changes on. That, in the end, could become the difference between life and death.

The game is mainly card driven. Since the trench lines only fluctuated little during the conflict around Ypres there is no use for a map of the area. For the soldiers a trench was a trench, maps where something for the higher ranks. Each game round plays over a two months period in which a series of events will take place.

—description from the designer