Last night I managed to get another game of Trench Crawl onto the table, this time against JT. As this was one of those occasions when the designer actually has to play his own rules rather than merely explain why they should work, I approached the evening with considerable confidence. This confidence lasted approximately as long as it took us to draw the first few cards.

The first game could hardly have produced two more different trench systems. JT’s trench set off across the table towards victory with all the determination of a Roman road builder who had been told there was overtime available if he reached the other side before lunch. Mine, meanwhile, meandered across the battlefield like a drunken surveyor looking for the pub he had just left. Every new section seemed determined to take me anywhere except towards the objective, until eventually the Exploration Deck put me out of my misery and presented me with a dead end.Doh!

JT therefore took the first game, and we reset everything for another attempt. The second game began in much the same fashion, with JT once again heading confidently towards the far side of the table while I began another scenic tour of the Italian defensive system. This time, however, the cards decided that JT had enjoyed quite enough success for one evening. After a promising start his trench suddenly terminated in a dead end. There was some satisfaction in this development, although not quite as much as I would have liked because he was still considerably further across the table than I was.

That meant I had to keep going.

Disaster nearly struck when my wandering trench began heading directly towards JT’s abandoned one. Apparently there are few things more embarrassing in trench warfare than spending half the battle crawling through enemy trenches in the wrong direction and then discovering somebody else’s trench occupying the space where you intended to go. For a while it looked as though I might manage the remarkable achievement of blocking my own advance with my opponent’s failed advance.

Fortunately, another turn appeared before the whole thing became a magnificent monument to poor military engineering. My trench swung around and finally began heading in the correct direction. Victory was suddenly possible, although the Italians had clearly decided that if they could not stop me getting there, they could at least make certain that very few Australians arrived to enjoy it.

By the time my battered section finally made its way through the position, I had only about half the troops I had started with. The enemy had proved considerably more resistant than I would have preferred, and the gradual loss of manpower and firepower certainly made those final trench sections rather more uncomfortable than the early ones. Still, a victory is a victory, particularly when the alternative is explaining how you managed to get lost in a trench system game that you designed yourself.

So we finished the evening one game each, which seemed a suitably respectable result for both of us.

There was, however, one important piece of playtesting feedback on which JT and I were in complete agreement. Our old and tired eyes are apparently no longer compatible with the original Quick Reference Sheet. The rules were fine. Reading the bloody thing was becoming the real test of morale. I have therefore given the QRS a bit of attention, changing the layout and increasing the font size so that consulting the rules no longer requires binoculars, a magnifying glass and the eyesight of a twenty year old.

I have added the revised two page A4 QRS to the blog for anyone interested in downloading it. It may not prevent your trench from wandering aimlessly across the battlefield, colliding with your opponent’s trench or ending abruptly in the middle of nowhere, but at least you will now be able to read the QRS explaining exactly how badly things have gone.