Cuius Regio: The Thirty Years War
by
GMT Games
This is what the designer has to say about this himself, Cuius Regio, and other games he has designed:
"Cuius Regio: Fighting the Thirty Years' War, Campaign by Campaign
The Thirty Years' War is a difficult war to turn into a game. It lasted thirty years, involved most of the major powers in Europe, and was really a collection of different conflicts that overlapped and changed over time. When I started working on Cuius Regio, one of the first things I had to decide was which part of that war I actually wanted to put on the table.
The answer was the Holy Roman Empire. Cuius Regio is an operational-level wargame for two players covering the war from the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Why the Thirty Years' War, and why this scope
The Thirty Years' War is often told as one big story, but it wasn't really like that. Different wars and campaigns were happening at different times, and the interests of the various countries involved changed quite a lot during the conflict.
So, fairly early in the design, we decided to concentrate on the Empire. We left out places such as the Low Countries, northern Italy and France. They were obviously connected to the war, but they also had their own dynamics. Including all of them would have made the game much bigger and, more importantly, would have required a much more complicated system.
In the game, one player commands the Imperial side and its allies, while the other controls the Protestant coalition opposing them.
How it plays
The game uses a single 34" x 33" map, with each hex representing 16 miles. A turn represents a whole year, and each army normally gets somewhere between three and five activations during that year.
Getting the scale right was probably one of the most important parts of the design. I wanted players to be able to recreate things like Mansfeld's march in 1626 or Gustavus Adolphus's campaign after landing in Germany in 1632, but I didn't want the game to take an entire evening just to resolve one battle or a few days of movement.
Most of the turn is about military operations, but there is quite a bit going on outside the battlefield too. After the armies have moved and fought, players go through Diplomatic and Recruitment phases. Controlling important cities gives you Political Points and losing them can help bring foreign powers into the war. Spain, Denmark, Sweden and France can all intervene and provide help to the side that is losing.
There's no separate diplomacy system — losing an important city doesn't just cost you the city, it can also make it more likely a foreign power intervenes.
Most sieges during the period didn't last months and months, so every city doesn't go through a long siege procedure. If the conditions are right, an army can take a city automatically, or the result is decided with a single die roll. This leaves room for the exceptional cases. Magdeburg or Stralsund can still turn into major events, but a little siege on the map doesn't become a mini-game.
Leaders have a single composite rating that represents tactical skill, logistics, political influence and their ability to attract recruits. The numbers were derived from regression analysis using historical outcomes. I preferred that to simply deciding that one commander was a 3 and another was a 2 because I happened to think he was better.
The numbers are still an abstraction. We can all have an opinion about whether Wallenstein was a better commander than Gustavus Adolphus, and in which particular areas. But trying to break that down into very precise numbers is, to me, mostly false precision.
Who it's for
The game is for players who want to make decisions rather than follow a historical script.
There isn't a rule telling you that Breitenfeld has to happen at a particular point, or that Gustavus Adolphus has to follow the same route he did historically. The players have armies, cities, alliances and a limited number of years, and they have to figure out what to do with them.
You can try to recreate history if you want. You can also completely ignore it. That's one of the things I like most about the game. The same starting position can produce very different wars.
In the end, winning is mostly about making fewer mistakes than the other player.
A word about support
Since the game was released, I've stayed quite involved with the community on BoardGameGeek and Bluesky. I answer rules questions and keep a Clarifications & Errata document updated.
I actually enjoy this part of publishing a game. If someone finds a rule that is unclear, I'd rather discuss it and fix it than leave everybody trying to work out what I meant six months later. Some of these discussions have also made me realize that I hadn't explained something as well as I thought I had.
The historical discussions are probably even more interesting. Players sometimes have a very different interpretation of an event from mine, and I enjoy those conversations even when I disagree with them.
About me
Cuius Regio is my first design, although it isn't my first published game.
I also designed Plantagenet for GMT Games, about the Wars of the Roses. It's part of the Levy & Campaign series designed by Volko Ruhnke. I've also designed two games for Salt & Pepper Games: Onoda, a solitaire game, and Habemus Papam, a negotiation and hidden-roles game.
So, I've somehow gone from medieval succession wars to a Japanese soldier hiding on an island for decades and then to a papal conclave. I'm not sure what that says about me as a designer, except that I apparently have a habit of choosing subjects that I find interesting and turn them into games.
I'm currently working on two more designs. One is an operational game about Vietnam, and the other is a 4X game that is designed to play much faster than most games in the genre. Neither has a publisher yet.
Cuius Regio is published by GMT Games. Mike Sigler is the developer, and Tomasz Niedzinski and Nicolas Roblin are the graphic designers. Nicolas also did the map, which I think looks fantastic.
A lot of people helped during the six years of development, and the game would be considerably worse without their contributions. That's one of the slightly strange things about designing a game: you may start with your own idea, but by the time it is published, it has usually become the result of a lot of other people's work as well"
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