Weimar Take 2

We lined up for another go at this game. We went for a random allocation and I again was the SPD.  Peter also was the DNVP again while Russel was Zentrum and Richard the KPD.

Things to note:

Seven Brown Shirts are in Parliament

Communists have control of Essen and Hamburg,

they are close to taking Berlin which would give them the game.

The DNVP (black) have control of Koln and Königsberg,

they need Berlin or two other cities to win out right.

The Nazis are just two steps away from crashing the system.

Top left shows all the pressures on the state that tipped it into anarchy.

The following is adapted from comments provided by Richard.

It was a great game where everyone had chances to win.

The game ended when Mark deliberately pushed the Reich into anarchy to win the game. This cost
him  (and Russell) 8 VPs, but he was able to absorb the 8 VP penalty to finish in front. Mark has the totals. I believe Russell came second and Peter and I were tied for third.

SPD 26, Zentrum 23, KPD and DNVP 18 each.

It could still have gone to either myself as KPD with better die rolls in the last impulse. Pete did also roll for a 4th Regime marker and possible victory. On reflection, I'm not entirely sure the second
attempt at a Regime was allowed, as the rules state you can only make a single coup attempt per impulse, i.e. per card play. The card Pete used allowed him to do 2 sets of actions, but they all occurred in his "impulse". There was no net game effect to this, however, as the attempt failed.

It was certainly a valid way for Mark to win and ironically Mark was the major beneficiary of all the threat markers that appeared in the Deutsche Reich as a result of the NSDAP plays. Somewhat of a hollow victory as a government party plunging the country into anarchy, but a game victory nonetheless.

It is certainly an example of how careful you need to be in the choices made. There certainly was short term gain for the parties which took the NSDAP trade off, however, with a commanding lead in VPs this then allowed Mark to exploit the end of game anarchy rule.

It looks like this is a 7 hour game, if it goes the full 6 turns. We were playing quite briskly and it worked out to roughly 1 hour per turn which also included rules questions.

A lot of the moral dilemmas (although there didn't seem to be a lot of qualms on show) regarding the NSDAP only appear in turns 5 and 6 so there would be a lot of difficult and interesting choices to explore without the stress of tiredness and/or time constraints.

I have posted 2 questions on the BGG forum regarding what happens in the case of a tie on play of the Altona Bloody Sunday card (who suffers NSDAP penalty) and also the All Quiet on the Western Front card where we weren't sure on how many seats and VPs to award for a "majority".

To the two questions the consensus is the Chancellor decides ties and the All Quiet card just provides 1 VP and 1 seat (which is how we played it after initially distributing 7 VPs and seats and after a short delay saying "Wait a minute...")