Review: Gear Krieg

Special thanks for this review go to Jamie Michael, who played the game with me, helped me figure out the rules, and provided some commentary from the perspective of a historical gamer.

Gear Krieg is a tabletop miniatures wargame set in an alternate World War Two in which pulp superscience is the dominant force on the battlefield. In addition to the tanks, planes and artillery of our own WWII, armies in the world of Gear Krieg employ armored walkers (nicknamed “gears”), jetpacks, and death rays.

Supertechnology aside, the world of Gear Krieg is a lot like ours around the end of 1941. The war is well underway, the USA and the USSR having just weighed in against the Axis. The main battlefronts are in North Africa, the Pacific, and Russia. Individual setting books will detail particular theaters (the North Africa book will be the first to be released), and it looks like the rules for new gears and vehicles will be released on a chronological basis as the war progresses. If you really want to recreate D-Day or Iwo Jima, this might be annoying, since you’ll have to come up with the stats for the correct equipment yourself.

The rulebook is divided up according to Dream Pod 9’s standard format, with setting information and “flavor” taking up the first half of the book, with rules material in the back. There are some oddities - friends of mine who speak more German than I assure me that the German unit names are gibberish, and a number of names are misspelt, irritating when dealing with historical characters. The art consists mostly of actual period photographs, edited to include gears. The rulebook is supposed to come with a set of counters and card miniatures, though mine didn’t. Must have fallen out somewhere along the line, I guess.

Gear Krieg is designed for two players, who alternate moving squads of infantry or vehicles around a miniature battlefield (although there are rules for playing the game on a hex map). Movement is measured in Movement Units, which correspond to different distances on the tabletop depending on the scales of the models involved (for some reason, there is no MU equivalency for 15mm, the scale in which the actual GK miniatures are going to be released). Each unit moves and performs a certain number of actions depending on its type and the number of its crew. The game seems designed for actions on a section to platoon level. My games so far have used only a squad or two of infantry and a handful of vehicles; this scale of game takes about two hours, and will probably take less once the vehicle record sheets are second nature to me.

The system is a dice pool mechanic. Each unit is rated on a number of skills: Driving, Gunnery, Tactics, and Leadership - or just the Infantry skill for foot soldiers. The player rolls a number of dice equal to the skill level of the unit, applies various modifiers, and compares the result to a difficulty Threshold or, more commonly, to an opposing roll by the other player. In the most common example, shooting at another unit, the shooter multiplies any positive difference by the damage multiplier of the weapon and compares the result to the target’s armor to determine what damage table to roll on.

That may sound a little complicated, and it can be the first time you play the game. In the early turns of my first game, figuring out the modifiers for shooting could be time-consuming. In practice, though, only a few types of modifiers are ever used, and I could remember them off the top of my head within a few rounds.

Infantry are handled in blocks, with each trooper armed with a particular weapon contributing to the overall value of the attack. Vehicle weapons are penalized when attacking infantry, with the exception of weapons like machine guns which are designed to hit large numbers of targets. This doesn’t always make the most sense - one trooper with an anti-tank rifle was killing two or three infantrymen with a shot in a game I played - but on the whole the results make sense.

There are a host of advanced rules covering things like morale (it varies depending on how important the troops consider the mission, which I thought was a nice touch), incendiary weapons, hazardous weather, fighting at night, and so forth. I haven’t tried them out yet, and they seem like they might add a significant level of complexity to an already moderately complex game.

The heart of the game for many players will be the gears, and only a few basic types are described. Germany, Japan, Britain, and the USA have two basic gear types each - generally a light fast one and a heavy slow one - with a number of variant weapon packages for each. The USSR hasn’t started mass-producing gears yet, and has to rely on British and American lend-lease material, as well as captured German ones. Most mecha games rely on having a wide variety of vehicles, so I’m sure we’ll see more and more gears in future supplements.

Rules are also provided for several types of tank per nation, as well as unarmored vehicles and artillery. Some of this information may upset grognards - the heavy tanks seem a little fragile, and the Sturmgeschutz looks a lot like a Jagdpanzer with a weird name. I’m willing to accept that the heavy armor has been scaled down a little to make gears more viable, so it doesn’t bother me too much. If you’re looking for historical accuracy, a game with giant legged fighting vehicles may not be for you anyway.

My biggest problem with Gear Krieg is the presentation of the rules. Here are the problems I can list off the top of my head:

- the initiative rules are written so that it seems that Initiative Command Points are awarded to the player who loses the roll, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

- the defensive modifiers for movement are listed in hexes, not MUs. I’m assuming they’re the same, but it’s just a guess.

- there’s a mistake in the section on determining how many actions a vehicle receives. A vehicle with three crew should receive two actions, not a vehicle with two crew.

- there are misprints on the vehicle record sheets, so that the ammo values end up in the Special Rules section.

All of these are mistakes that can be figured out from an extended perusal of the game, from context, and (in the case of initiative) from the game’s parent, Heavy Gear. My opponent and I figured them out pretty quickly, but they make learning the game difficult, particularly for novice players.

If this review seems ambivalent about Gear Krieg, it’s because I am. I like the setting, and I have found the rules simple and enjoyable. However, I firmly believe that the best way to learn the rules will be from another experienced player, and that the rulebook as written only makes picking up the game more difficult. If a second printing or edition corrects this flaws, my opinion of Gear Krieg will shoot up.