Designer's Comments

The game about the Somme 1916 by Jim Wallman, Andy Grainger and me, with a lot of development effort by Bernie Ganley and Mukul Patel. The original game was called Muck and Bullets. It was devised for year 9 at St. Olave's School as part of their studies of WW1, before they visited Flanders.

Jim wrote the rules and devised the game approach. I devised the map and produced briefings, OOB and carried out game production. Andy took the game and changed it to become a Megagame as part of the Megagame Makers series of games. He changed the name to "Price of Victory", which is part of a quote from Haig's final despatch. I took the game to Leeds and ran it there on a cut-down basis.

The game has two versions of the map. Players all have an A3 Map with Grid which shows the normal map features, including contour mapping (produced by my friend David Loyd from satellite height data) in shaded relief. The map does not, however, have the movement areas shown on it. The game play board has a simpler, cleaner, background without the contour mapping or the grid, but it shows the movement areas used by the game system. The maps were printed as A2 for most players, with A1 copies for senior commands. T he playing board was separated into 6 sections and printed so that the whole area was 8 metres square. Should you want to look at, or play with the CorelDraw(X3) file used to produce those maps, then please download the POV Map but please attribute me in any copy or derivative file.

Andy changed the original Muck and Bullets rules, but I have given the originals here as being simpler. There are also some short rules which are sufficient to run the game and which can be printed (double-sided) on a sheet of A4.

Downloads

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