They Shall Not Pass:
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2022

Our Playbook format includes a complete game (except for the dice) inside a book, with historical articles and other support materials in it. It’s not a particularly new idea (magazines with games in them have been published for longer than most people have been alive), but it helps keep costs down, for shipping in particular, and that’s very nice for overseas customers.

It’s fun to play wargames. Plenty of people have additional fun reading about them and the history behind them. What happened, why it happened, and how the game presents those events and the choices that led to them. With the Playbook, we’re trying to meld together both kinds of fun: a good game and a good read, all under one cover.

They Shall Not Pass is a Playbook-format game on the February 1916 German assault on Verdun. It covers the first ten days of the battle, before the German high command decided to expand the battle to the west bank of the river Meuse. That keeps both the battle area and the scope of the operations manageable, and the map and the set of pieces to a reasonable size.

Verdun became a symbol of France’s suffering during the entire Great War as three-quarters of the army’s active divisions saw combat there. Total losses at Verdun came to over 700,000: the French suffered 161,440 dead and missing and 216,377 wounded, the Germans 142,000 dead and missing and 187,000 wounded. Those listed as “missing” can almost all be assumed to have died; the massive artillery barrages simply obliterated huge numbers of men.

The impact went far beyond the numbers. “I did Verdun,” as French veterans put it, came to carry a much deeper meaning. Those who survived would never be the same. Nor would their country.

By the time the battle ended, the French held Verdun. But they had indeed been “bled white,” and the French Army never truly recovered from its losses at Verdun – though it held on long enough to win the war. If the Germans were ever going to take Verdun, it was going to happen in the first phase of the battle, and that’s where designer William Sariego has placed the game in They Shall Not Pass.

As the game’s action opens, the Germans have assembled a fairly powerful force of fresh infantry divisions, backed by copious artillery. The French respond by throwing in a stream of reinforcements, including plenty of their own guns. And while their infantry is not usually quite as good as that of the Germans, they do have the aged fortifications of Verdun to aid the defense. Carnage results.

Units are mostly regiments (almost all of them infantry), rated for their combat strength, movement and morale. Artillery units in addition have range and bombardment strength. Infantry regiments have two “steps” of strength; the handful of battalions have but one.

The game system is simple to play, yet it has subtle interactions that aren’t immediately obvious. Artillery is the god of war and at no time more so than during the Great War. And so the game includes a separate Bombardment Phase, during which you bombard the enemy with your artillery. That usually results in a morale check, which can demoralize your troops if they fail. If they fail again, they can lose strength. If you really shell the hell out of someone you can eliminate them outright, but mostly you’re trying to shake their will to fight.

Then there’s assault combat, which is straight-up odds-based wargaming, though combat results in “hits” (step losses, pretty much). So you shell the enemy first, weaken his resolve, and then you send in the infantry. But it doesn’t always work out that way: units on the defense are tough, and if they’re French they have a bunch of forts to help them, plus there are trenches.

Combat is intensely bloody. It’s going to cost you troops to take or hold ground. If you’re the Germans and get a lodgment into the enemy positions, you need to exploit it – you’re not going to get repeated chances. You can make a greater advance if your attackers include pioneers, but those highly-skilled combat engineers are in short supply and the French are going to be doing their best to wipe them out because of those special abilities. If you’re the French and the Germans take your key positions, you need to take them back or even repeated sightings of Ste. Jeanne aren’t going to help you.

It’s also hard to give ground, unless you have a clear path of retreat. Your troops will have to check their morale to retreat into an enemy “zone of control,” and that can be deadly if they’re already demoralized.

You’ll get plenty of reinforcements, whichever side you play, and you’re going to need them – your front-line divisions will melt away in this fearsome environment. There are no panzer reserves to surge through the lines; you’ve got some light infantry but they won’t stand up to a counter-attack without some help. Artillery may be the god of war, but infantry is the queen of battle.

All of that makes for an intense little game that’s going to occupy your attention. Both players have a lot to do, and those reinforcements mean that it’s not over ’til it’s over – until the last turn, you’ve still got a shot at pushing the enemy back. The game plays at a different pace than a Second World War game, and you’ll want to think ahead as you integrate your bombarding with your plans for assaulting.

Physically, the game comes inside the book. And inside the book are the rules (21 pages’ worth, so not a whole lot of rules as wargames go) and a whole bunch of exposition on the battle and the armies involved. With that are the pieces, 140 of them, die-cut and mounted. And the map, a 22x28-inch paper map with all the charts and such needed for play (the actual live area for play is somewhat less than 22x17 inches). You’ve got everything you need to play, except for the dice. You have plenty of dice, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

You can order They Shall Not Pass right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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