Interview with Maurice Suckling Designer of Crisis: 1914 from Worthington Publishing Currently on Kickstarter

We became acquainted with Maurice Suckling with his game Freeman’s Farm 1777 from Worthington Publishing in 2019 and really enjoyed the mechanics of that game and how they all came together to create an interactive and interesting look at the Battle of Saratoga in the American Revolution. Since that time, Maurice has designed several games that have went onto successful Kickstarter campaigns including Hidden Strike: American Revolution, Chancellorsville 1863 and 1565 Siege of Malta. He is now working on a game that is tied to the buildup of tensions that led to the outbreak of The Great War called Crisis: 1914 from Worthington Publishing, which is currently on Kickstarter. We reached out to him and asked if he could give us some information about the design.

If you are interested in Crisis: 1914, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1456271622/crisis-1914

*Note: The pictures and game art used in this interview, and pictures showing any of the various components and cards, are still in design and are intended to be illustrative at this point. Also remember that rules might still change prior to final development and publication.

Grant: What is your new upcoming game Crisis: 1914?

Maurice: The game is about the diplomatic crisis that erupted with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Historians know it as the July Crisis, and it gave rise to World War I, but war didn’t happen immediately after the assassination – it took about 6 weeks for matters to reach a climax – and nor was it, arguably, inevitable.

The game puts players in the shoes of leading statesmen of the crisis, tasking them with winning by generating the most Prestige (the game’s victory points) whilst avoiding losing by generating too much Tension (which also comes from generating Prestige). If you create too much Tension you cause your enemies to mobilize. In this game, if you provoke anyone into mobilizing, you lose – the guilt of causing The Great War rests with you – and the game ends shortly afterwards.

Grant: What do you want the title to convey to players?

Maurice: My hope is the title will quickly get players – or prospective players – to understand this relates to history they might know – 1914 is a date that means something to many gamers – but that it will also clue them in on the angle I’m taking. Perhaps the word “crisis” will spark thoughts of a diplomatic crisis for people – at least, the title doesn’t necessarily equate directly to the war itself. And, a crisis promises drama, and I hope invokes a call to action- to prevent the crisis from spiraling out of control.

Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest?

Maurice: The U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan (1904-2005) called the First World War “the seminal catastrophe of the Twentieth Century,” and it’s a fascinating hinge point on which history swings a decidedly tragic way. Gavrilo Princip missing his shots, or the Archduke’s car not being outside that café at the time, or at least not stalling as it turned around, is one of those ‘what if?’ moments in history it’s hard not to fixate on and fantasize about alternative history from that that point onwards.

I’ve been fascinated by this topic for about as long as I’ve been playing historical games, which is almost as long as I’ve been alive. At the heart of the story of the crisis is a story about brinkmanship – in essence an elaborate game of chicken – and that feels like something players will enjoy diving into.

Grant: What research did you do to get the details correct? What one must read source would you recommend?

Maurice: I read lots of books and articles, encompassing the bulk of scholarship on this topic (and I’m still going – there is a lot, and I don’t seem to be able to stop). T.G. Otte’s July Crisis: The World’s Descent Into War, Summer 1914 (2014) might be the best single volume I’ve read on this topic. But Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War (2013) is a really good read, and there are numerous others, like Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012), that bring a different kind of focus to different aspects – in Clark’s case he’s immensely thorough about the Serbian and Balkan context of the assassination.

There’s also a BBC TV mini series called 37 Days (2014) about the crisis, which I recommend to help people get in the mood – it covers many of the major beats of the story – at least from a British perspective.

Grant: What from the historical period of pre-WWI is most important to model?

Maurice: That really depends on what your design focus is. If your design lens is attempting to capture simmering imperial tensions in the decades preceding the war you need to look at economic rivalry as well as colonial rivalry, the arms race, and the way in which alliances shifted during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and into the first decades of the Twentieth. There’s a rather wonderful (and short) game I recently found (it was only recently published) called Sleepwalkers: Imperial Rivalries and the Great War (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/383375/sleepwalkers-imperial-rivalries-and-great-war) – which does a great job of capturing these elements in a couple of pages of rules and an elegant design.

In my case, my design lens was focused just on the diplomatic crisis from June 28 through to early August, so for me, the essence was modeling brinkmanship in that time window – and by that, I really mean modeling the game of chicken. But that being said, this 6 week window is highly contextualized by not just immediate events, but also more long running policy trajectories. That’s to say, each nation has its own array of narrative threads to follow, such as British reluctance to be drawn into any continental war, or, in France, the Trial of Madame Caillaux for murder, or, in Russia, the influence of Rasputin at court, or, in Germany, the prospect of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire – and the related issue in Britain of impounding dreadnoughts built for the Ottomans… All of these different threads contribute to the depth and richness of this story.

Grant: Is this a wargame? Political game? How would you best classify it?

Maurice: Ah…

If you like wargames, this is a wargame. If the game isn’t eligible for wargame awards if it’s not considered a wargame, it’s a wargame. (Awards actually matter a great deal, not only in sustaining and promoting the hobby, but also for individuals, especially those who have careers built in and around games.)

Let me also add, this is a game about a diplomatic crisis that led to war. An historian who researches the July Crisis would, I think, consider themselves to be an historian of diplomatic history, albeit diplomacy that is highly adjacent to military history.

To me, this isn’t a wargame, because the focus of play isn’t predominantly concerned with the execution of military or political-military operations; the focus of play is on formulating diplomatic responses to a diplomatic crisis – and if you misjudge these a war might start.

But then we know from Clausewitz that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and we know from Foucault that politics is the continuation of war by other means…so…now I’m tempted to answer in whatever way will upset the least or the most people, depending on the mood I’m in…

Maybe we just call it a conflict simulation game – and have the discussion about defining “simulation” some other time…

Grant: What is your overall design goal with the game?

Maurice: I want players to experience some version of the dilemmas of their historical counterparts – they must corral the hawks and the doves from their respective cabinets and governments into a coherent and appropriate course of action, whilst trying to figure out if the other players are going to blink first.

If brinkmanship – the game of chicken – is at the heart of this game, then I also want to show that decisions are uneasy amalgams of groups of humans pushing and pulling in often conflicting directions – that these nations on the brink of WWI are not monoliths, decisions are tortured, and outcomes are often unpredictable.

If I can achieve this I can get to what lies behind my design goal(s) – and that is to help players see the humans in this story, and to see the story as deeply fascinating in its own right – a seminal catastrophe of its own, prior to the war itself – because it might have been averted.

I think that what historical games are best equipped to do is to demonstrate the contingency in history – to show how uncertain things feel at the time – and conveying this contingency is always at the heart of what my designs are attempting.

Grant: How much negotiation and table talk is there between players?

Maurice: Perhaps somewhat strangely, for a game on this topic, this isn’t largely a game about negotiation. There is a feature of the game where, each ‘game week’ players can agree to a peace conference – which makes war less likely to occur (reduces everyone’s Tension levels), but helps the player who is in a position to offer the peace conference (increases their Prestige), and this can lead to negotiations. Other than that, it’s not a feature of the game. To explain a little more – the design systematizes negotiations into a value structure (diplomatic pressure points on cards, ranging from 0 to 4), and players play these cards to their tableau. We can think of the play of these cards as quantitative representations of the quality of negotiating – so, in that sense, negotiation is subsumed with the game system itself.

As for table talk – the game encourages it – and, in my experience – it naturally flows in and around the sequence of play as players add cards to their tableaux and it becomes more clear how they are conducting play over the course of the current game week and who is holding their nerve and for how long. (The game is broken into six scoring phases, the game calls ‘weeks’.) In Battlestar Galactica, everyone spends their time accusing other players of being a Cylon. In Crisis: 1914, people seem to spend their time accusing other players of being about to make the war happen.

Grant: What are the playable factions? How do these get split up among the various player counts of 1-5 players?

Maurice: The game scales like this:

If you have 1 player you use the Austria-Hungary deck.

If you have 2 players you add the Russia deck.

If you have 3 players you add the Germany deck.

If you have 4 players you add the France deck.

If you have 5 players you add the Britain deck.

Grant: Who are the different playable statesman?

Maurice: For Austria-Hungary you play as Count Leopold Berchtold, foreign minister.

For Russia you play as Sergei Sazonov, foreign minister.

For Germany you play as Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, Chancellor.

For France you play as Raymond Poincaré, President.

For Britain you play as Sir Edward Grey, foreign secretary.

Grant: How does the games use cards? Does each faction have their own unique deck?

Maurice: The different statesmen don’t have different unique abilities (they did earlier on in development, although this idea withered away), but – yes – each deck is unique, and this felt a better way of reflecting their own differing situations.

All the decks have 24 cards, and they all have 6 Assertion Cards (a certain type of card important for scoring Prestige Points). These cards represent the key personalities involved in the July Crisis for that nation, or they represent key concepts central to each nation’s response to the crisis – such as the Alliance with Russia, in the case of France, or the threat of a German invasion of Belgium, in the case of Britain. This is how those differing narrative threads mentioned earlier can be threaded into the design. Cards are a wonderful design tool for integrating rules exceptions, but they can also be a wonderful design tool for integrating narrative elements to enrich a game.

Almost all the cards have a Diplomatic Pressure Value ranging from 0 (low) to 4 (high). Each deck has differing numbers of cards of all values. Some individual cards have differing values, depending on the context of the game – they might start as a 1, but later become a 4, for example (this is what happens with the David Lloyd George card in the British deck if German actions begin to alarm Britain). In general, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German decks have more high value cards than the French and British decks, but those three decks also have cards in them that can cause those players to lose the game (by mobilizing themselves). The game is attempting to balance risks with rewards in a way that corresponds with the historical record.

Grant: What is the anatomy of these cards? Can you show us some examples?

Maurice: Here are some prototypes, from Sean Cooke at Worthington Publishing (note: these, and all art shown here, are not final art images and subject to change):

Grant: What are the different possible card effects?

Maurice: Aside from the Diplomatic Pressure Value of a card the major effects are:

• Assertion: if you have 4+ of these cards on your tableau your Prestige points are doubled at the end of the Week.
• Consensus: for every 2 of these cards on your tableau you may play 1 more card to it (there is a default limit of 7 cards per tableau per week).
• National Interests: for every 1 of these cards on your tableau you may play 1 more card to it.
• Diplomatic Back-Channel: for every card with this ability you may add or move a second score marker on the Score track to increase diplomatic pressure without raising the Tension that comes from it.
• Momentum: if you have 3+ of these cards on your tableau your opposing nation (and allies) may not Deliberate or Reorganize for the rest of the current game week.
• Caution: this card lets you pick up an extra card from the top of your draw pile, or remove an Assertion card from your tableau.

But there are also other cards that have unique effects. Not all of these are helpful to you. Sometimes cards cause you to discard cards from your own hand (which is bad – it reduces your options). For Berchtold, for example, the Count Tisza card can be a significant problem; for Grey, the Irish Home Rule Crisis is a problem. Every deck has several of these cards that make the player’s life harder (and more interesting) – and align with those narrative threads I keep threading back into this conversation.

Grant: What is the makeup of the game board? What areas of Europe are covered?

Maurice: The board is a conceptual map with boxes to keep track of scores (with a cartographic background for flavor taking us from Britain in the west to European Russia in the east, and as far south as Italy and Turkey), and some other tracks (Initiative, Score, Calendar), and legends (for turn sequence, and points scoring).

The five playable nations (Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, Britain) each have their own City Box. There are also arrows on the board showing the target for any Tension generated.

Grant: What are City Boxes? How are they used?

Maurice: Within each City Box are the same 3 core elements:

• Spaces for Prestige Dice
• Spaces for Tension Dice
• A Belligerence Track

Berlin and St. Petersburg have more spaces for Tension because the Tension created there can ‘flow down’ to France and Britain (in the case of Berlin) and to Germany (in the case of St. Petersburg). 

Grant: What is the Belligerence Track?

Maurice: This is the track at the bottom of each City Box with spaces ranged from 0 to 5.

Each game starts with every Belligerence track set to 0. 

The Belligerence Action is a core element in the game.

Players have up to 5 Belligerence Actions in a game, but can have fewer depending on when they choose to play them (if Tension is already high players won’t be able to play as many).

This action doubles the Diplomatic Pressure Value of the card it’s attached to, and scores a Prestige Point if you ‘win’ the week it’s played in, or lose a Prestige Point if you don’t win. It also increases the minimum Tension levels in the entire City Box, which can’t ever be de-escalated from that new level for the rest of the game.

Grant: What are the differences between Prestige Dice and Tension Dice?

Maurice: Prestige Dice are white.

Tension Dice are red.

No dice are rolled in this game – it’s entirely card (and psychology) driven.

The dice are used as trackers – each pip on a dice face represents 1 Prestige or 1 Tension, depending on the color of the die.

Grant: What are the player boards?

Maurice: Each player has their own board to help them manage their deck – it tells who they’re playing as, which cards to remove at the start of the game, and how/when these cards might come into play. The board also helps track certain events which have an impact on the value of specific cards under certain conditions.

Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?

Maurice: Players take it in turns (starting with the player at the top of the Initiative Track) to take one action.

Play keeps going until everyone has Passed, then scores are calculated for the week, and if the game isn’t over, another week begins and the same sequence repeats.

There are 6 basic actions:

1. Pass (if you have 5+ cards on your tableau you may do this; if you already have 7 cards on your tableau and no special cards you must do this).
2. Play a card from your hand.
3. Play a card from the top of your draw pile.
4. Deliberate (discard a card from your hand to take the top 3 cards from your draw pile, play 1, and keep the other 2 in your hand). This also moves you into last place on the Initiative Track next turn.
5. Reorganize (discard a card from your hand to look at and reorder, if you wish, the top 3 cards of your draw pile).
6. Seize the Initiative (if your current Diplomatic Pressure Total is equal to or higher than whoever is first on the Initiative Track) – discard 3 cards from hand. This moves you into first place on the Initiative Track next turn.

There’s also one additional thing you can do. Whenever you play a card you may choose to play it as a Belligerence Action – which we just briefly covered.

Grant: How do players achieve victory?

Maurice: The player with the most Prestige Points at the end of the game is the winner.

There are 6 scoring moments in the game. These all come at the end of each game week when everyone’s stopped playing cards to their tableaux.

The player with the most Diplomatic Pressure Points scores 3 Prestige Points, the player with the second most Diplomatic Pressure Points scores 2 Prestige Points (in the 3-5 player game), and anyone who didn’t come first or second but hit at least 14 Diplomatic Pressure Points scores 1 Prestige Point.

The player at the top of the Initiative Track scores 1 Prestige Point.

A player can also double their Prestige Points by having 4 or more Assertion Cards on their tableau, and gain a Prestige Point for playing a Belligerence Action if they win the week, or lose a Prestige Point if they played a Belligerence Action and didn’t win the week.

But the question is also – how do you not lose the game?

Depending on the amount of Diplomatic Pressure generated at the end of a week players are also generating Tension. Tension is a measure of how alarmed your opposing nation (and its allies) are at your Diplomatic Pressure Totals – it’s a measure of how close you are to provoking them into mobilizing: if they mobilize because of you it’s your fault. You need to keep Tension below 6 to avoid losing.

In the case of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany, it’s also possible to lose by playing cards to your tableau that compel you to mobilize of your own nation’s volition – it depends how many risks you decide to take, and how many risks everyone else is prepared to take around you, which has an impact on your own deck. Think of it this way – the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia provoked the Russian partial mobilization, which in turn brought Germany closer to mobilizing, and so on. There’s a web of interconnected causal dependencies between the three most overtly aggressive nations in the crisis, which we can be represented through a sub-system flow chart:

People can play it closer to the wire or much more cautiously, but these decisions impact other players as the game loss ‘General Mobilization’ Cards come closer to being drafted into the draw pile and then played to the tableau.

Grant: How does the solitaire mode work?

Maurice: The solo game is really a different experience from the 2-5 player game. There are no other players to play chicken with, so you’re playing against a high score, to see how high you can push your Prestige (without creating too much Tension to lose).

With Berchtold’s deck you also have some options to take more or fewer risks. If you play the Ultimatum to Serbia early this is worth more Prestige Points than if you play it later – but the earlier you play it the harder it is to stop a General Mobilization from happening – and if that card comes out you will lose.

Grant: How does the AI function to make decisions and priorities? 

Maurice: I know it might sound a little odd, but there’s actually no AI in the game – at least not in a conventional sense. The solo game self-regulates through the trade off of high Diplomatic Pressure leading to high Tension, and through the nature of the deck.

In a sense there is AI throughout all the decks, which partially interferes and partially helps with what players are attempting to do – representing an array of people and concepts with a range of Diplomatic Values coming to bear on the crisis.

Grant: What are you most pleased about with the outcome of the design?

Maurcie: I love that people are enjoying playing it, and finding different strategies with which to approach it.

I think beyond that I’m maybe most pleased with finding a way to approach another dimension of history other than military history (even if highly adjacent to it) – to be contributing to the broader ‘design discussion’ about how we might model, or represent, or depict less well-trodden aspects of history in game form. This, of course, is subject to some kind of consensus that this is actually what I’ve done – so we shall wait and see how players respond to it once the game is published and on their tables. 

Grant: What type of experience does the game create for players?

Maurice: You should feel confronted with difficult choices, especially towards the end of each week – feeling pressure to increase Diplomatic Pressure, but pressure to be restrained with generating Tension, yet also constrained by what cards that you have in hand, and what cards might be (unseen) at the top of your draw pile. You should also feel like it’s a difficult choice when you play a Belligerence Action, when do you attempt to get 4 Assertion Cards on your tableau at the same time, and just how do you balance risk with reward.

When I took the game to Circle DC in March, I was lucky enough to have several excellent and highly engaged playtesters. One of them was Dan Bullock who sent me this message after the game:

“I have thought a lot about 1914 since trying it…your design has a keen sense of players struggling to control the tempo of the proceedings – like five grubby hands all clutching the same steering wheel. So good!!!”

From Dan – that means something – Dan is one of the most exciting, fearless, and important designers I know (and I know quite a lot). And three exclamation marks is a lot!!! 

Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau was also at the same playtest with Dan. He had this to say:

“Crisis 1914 feels deep without ever being overbearing. It is a tightly knit net of interwoven mechanisms, which depicts the events preceding World War I as a tense multi-sided arm wrestling contest. Players are incentivized to show their strength without flipping the negotiation table either, pushing their luck as they add cards to their tableau and raise the temperature. As an historical game, it is both rich and accessible. As a diplomacy game, it feels unlike most games of its ilk. As a social experience and as an excuse to blame everyone else for trying to start the Great War – how dare they?! – it is pretty much in a class of its own!”

The game has also evolved further since they played it, with re-designs to the board, and almost all the cards, in one way or another.

Grant: Are there any stretch goals with this Kickstarter campaign?

Maurice: No – there was a prospect of one, but Worthington decided to wrap it into the core offering. It’s an historical and design notes booklet. It covers the kinds of things I’ve been talking about – the sub-systems, and the numerous narrative threads, but going into more detail – explaining each of the 120 cards. But it’s a large document, running to over 20,000 words, which I’d also like to have annotated with thumbnails, but we shall see if that happens.

It’s been a huge workload (and hugely enjoyable) – and I think entirely necessary to engage with the history appropriately to inform the design. I’ve been grateful for the significant contributions of Darian Shump, a colleague and friend at RPI, who has been functioning as a research assistant to help me track down various sources. Without him helping me I’d be several months further behind schedule – so, thank you, Darian!

Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?

Maurice: Let me restrict myself to talking about just the ones I’m actively working on right now (within the last week or so)…

For GMT, on the P500 (now at 489!) I have Rebellion: Britannia (co-designed with Daniel Burt) – about rebellions in first century Roman Britain – you’ve been helping us get the word out about that – so thank you! It’s a fast-playing card-driven ‘co-opertition’ game for 1-4 players blending irregular warfare, with pitched battles, politics, engineering (building roads, settlements, and forts if you’re the Romans), and destruction (burning places down, if you’re the Britons).

For Fort Circle (just signed last month), I have Peace 1905 (co-designed with Nathaniel Berkley, Bill Sullivan, and S.P. Shaman), a game about signing the peace treaty to end the Russo-Japanese War. It’s a sister game, in a sense, to Crisis: 1914, in that they’re both games where you lose by winning too hard. In Peace 1905, if you get your way with too many of the clauses of the treaty (the ‘issues’) you will cause the other player to storm out of the negotiations and this means you lose the game – so you have to win, but by the right amount. There’s a fair amount of conceptual crossover, but they’re two utterly different designs.

Still fairly early on, but I’m already talking to Phalanx about it, is a game derived from literature rather than history – its working title is Fall of Camelot – a 2-4 player game about trying to destroy/save Camelot, find/hide Avalon, find/hide the Holy Grail, with dragons, giants, magic, and prophecies.

There’s one other, but the publisher asked me not to say anything about that. So I won’t. Not even this bit. Or this.

Thanks again for your time in answering our questions Maurice and for your great attention to detail and how you explain your design thoughts. This type of explanation is very interesting to players, especially of historical simulations, as they want to know the details and how you are accounting for the history. These details make for a much richer and rewarding play experience and also show that you have thought long and hard about how to model things to replicate that history. Excellent work as always! I very much look forward to playing this game and cannot wait to check out all of your “work-in-progress” games as well.

If you are interested in Crisis: 1914, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1456271622/crisis-1914