With this new My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.

Card #2: Vsevolod Merkulov from Churchill: Big 3 Struggle for Peace from GMT Games

The players in Churchill: Big Three Struggle for Peace take on the roles of Churchill, Roosevelt, or Stalin during World War II as they maneuver against each other over the course of 10 Conferences that determine who will lead the Allied forces, where those forces will be deployed, and how the Axis will be defeated. The player whose forces collectively have greater control over the surrendered Axis powers will win the peace and the game.

Churchill is not necessarily a wargame, but more of a political conflict of cooperation and competition. Over the course of the 10 historical conferences from 1943 till the end of the war this mechanic and much of the design should not be taken literally. Before and after each conference small groups of advisors and senior officials moved between the Allied capitals making the deals that drove the post war peace. These advisors and senior officials are represented by cards with an assigned numeric value that represents an amount of influence. Each conference sees one of a group of issues nominated for inclusion in the conference for debating and discussion. The issues categories include: Theater leadership changes, directed offensives, production priorities, clandestine operations, political activity, and strategic warfare (A-bomb). Each of the historical conference cards independently puts some number of issues, such as directed offensives or production priorities, metaphorically on the table, while the players nominate an additional 7 issues.

I have found that in any card game (but mostly in deck building games where you will be building your deck to become more and more powerful as you add cards to it), the proper management and manipulation of your deck is one of the major keys to victory. This manipulation will thin your deck, weeding out the worse cards to make room for the best cards and will ensure that you consistently draw the best cards from your deck to be able to play them and take advantage of their special powers at the most opportune times. While Churchill is far from a deck building game, as your deck is static and will be used relatively unchanged throughout the whole game, you do have some opportunities with the Soviet deck to thin out the less powerful cards to ensure that your high powered cards come out more often.

The 2 such cards found in the Soviet deck that do this function include Vsevolod Merkulov and Lavrenty Beria. In this entry, I will focus on Merkulov but both of these 2 cards are intended to replicate the constant state of paranoia and fear regarding traitors and leaks in the Soviet government. Merkulov was the People’s Commissar of State Security and his role was to ferret out weaker links in the apparatus. These cards function the same and have the following text:

After playing or discarding the next Soviet staff card THIS conference, roll 1d6: on a 1, remove that card from the game due to execution (or arrest in the case of Merkulov).

I like to use Merkulov when drawn early in the game, to try and get rid of some of the 1 and 2 power cards that don’t offer much benefit by sending them to the Siberian Gulag. Beware though, as you have to plan this carefully as you don’t want to play a card like Budyonny right after one of these guys. I know that you have to roll a 1 for Merkulov’s power to kick in and get rid of one of your low value cards, and that the chances of this happening are pretty remote, but early in the game, it is definitely something that you want to focus on and plan for as it will increase the odds that you draw out your 3, 4 and 5 value cards more often in the late game. I would also say you need to make sure you don’t play one of your power cards after these guys ever. It is not worth the risk!

The historical significance of the card is that Merkulov was the head of the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) from February to July 1941 and again from April 1943 to March 1946. He was a leading member of what was later described as the “Beria Gang”. The Beria Gang was a group of Stalin’s thugs who helped him to enforce his rule and make sure that there was blind obedience. Merkulov was involved in many nasty practices and was not well liked by his friends or enemies.

In the next entry in this series, we will take a look at Spiculum from Time of Crisis: The Age of Iron and Rust Expansion from GMT Games.

-Grant