I wrote this for the anniversary of the Battle of Bardia about fifteen years ago, not because anniversaries require ceremony, but because they bring unfinished thoughts to light. Bardia was the first time Australian troops were ordered to attack a stronghold directly and take it apart by hand. There were no alternative plans, just continuous fighting in trenches. I’ve revisited Bardia many times, on game boards, in notebooks, and in incomplete rule sets stored away for years. Each time, I was left with the same question: not who won, but how anyone managed to keep going.

Published today you can pick it up on Amazon or Wargames Vault.

Trench Crawl and my other rule sets are not a sudden inspiration. These are house rules I’ve been writing, rewriting, and quietly testing for nearly thirty years. They started as margin notes for late-night games, solo refights when no one else was interested, and long arguments about what trench fighting actually felt like once the maps stopped working. They evolved slowly, shaped less by theory than by dissatisfaction with neat outcomes and clean victories. Only now am I finally getting around to dragging them into the twenty-first century and turning them all into something coherent, playable, and shareable.

Trench Crawl comes from that process. It’s not a game about winning. It’s about whether your section survives until the end of the trench. It doesn’t focus on who wins the battle, but on how long a unit can keep going under pressure, fatigue, and uncertainty. This is important because, in history, most trench fighting wasn’t about complete destruction. It was about morale, teamwork, exhaustion, and not being able to face one more close fight.

At its core, Trench Crawl is a trench exploration and fighting game for two or more players, or for solo play. Each game focuses on a single advance through a fortified trench, rather than an entire siege or broad strategy. The scale is intentionally small and cramped. There are no large flanking moves or major breakthroughs. The trench itself poses challenges, with play happening in a maze of blind spots, firing areas, dead ends, and unexpected turns where every choice matters and every error adds up.

The game focuses on the process of modeling rather than specific outcomes. It doesn’t aim to show exact casualty numbers or improve weapon efficiency. Losses are represented in a general way, highlighting fear, confusion, and the gradual loss of teamwork. A section doesn’t fail just because it loses soldiers; it fails when it becomes fragile, confused, or can’t move forward. This failure can happen abruptly or gradually, but it seldom resembles a clear defeat.

One key aspect of the design is that the trench system isn’t planned beforehand. Instead, it reveals itself as the game progresses. Each move uncovers a new trench section or junction, some leading forward and others ending unexpectedly. This setup makes planning difficult. Players usually see only a move or two ahead, and losing momentum can be very costly. Decisions are made with limited information, reflecting how trench warfare became unpredictable after the fighting began and maps became unreliable.

When contact occurs, it is sudden and personal. Fighting happens at close range in confined spaces where visibility is poor and angles are awkward. There is no sense of a stable firing line or a comfortable engagement distance. Each contact represents a brief, violent clash that may seem minor in isolation but leaves a mark that matters later. Individual fights are survivable. Repeated fights are dangerous. Even success carries a cost, and a section that wins every encounter can still fail the crawl.

Rather than focusing on detailed casualty counts, Trench Crawl emphasizes pressure. Pressure arises from movement, contact, suppression, hesitation, and delay, influencing unit behavior more than firepower. Suppression limits options, slows advances, and raises the chance of a unit stalling or withdrawing. Over time, this creates a pattern where initial progress seems manageable, mid-crawl fatigue sets in, and late-crawl choices become increasingly urgent. The system was tested to ensure a typical infantry section could remain effective during prolonged trench engagements, but only if managed carefully and not pushed forward recklessly.

Withdrawal is not seen as failure. Players are expected to stop, regroup, or pull back, and knowing when to do so is often the most crucial choice. Many trench battles in history ended without a clear winner, with both sides tired and confused about who had the upper hand. The rules acknowledge this by considering survival, teamwork, and ongoing effectiveness as important results on their own.

Inspired by warfare from the twentieth century, Trench Crawl is designed to be timeless. The game’s core mechanics—discovering trenches, resolving contact, managing pressure, and withdrawal—work the same whether in ancient, medieval, nineteenth-century, or twentieth-century settings. Only the weapons and descriptions differ. The experience of moving into a hidden, defended position remains fundamentally unchanged.

This design approach extends beyond Trench Crawl and influences all my current projects, including a skirmish game based on the French and Indian Wars, Escape from Stalag 22, a card game about captivity, Shattered Hulls, an ancient naval game, and Sand, Sweat and Camels, which will release soon. The same concepts inform Hold the Line, an Heroic Victorian game, Aluminum Clouds, an anime skirmish game, and Channel Clash, along with a major rules writing project on the Australian Frontier Wars. The Hennessy series, starting with Hennessy of the AIF, a historical account of Operation Opossum, and a wargame scenario book about the Kokoda Track are books also in development.

All of it comes back to the same instinct that first drew me to Bardia. I’m less interested in perfect plans and decisive victories than in what happens when those things fall apart. Trench Crawl is an attempt to model that moment honestly. It’s taken a long time to arrive here.