Quartermaster General: WW2 in 2 hours + Now with WW1!

[Galdred]

I was a big fan of World in Flames when I was younger, and managed to save one room (yes, you need one entire room to play the game!) when we moved on to play it with friends for 10 days when I was a teenager.
We met every day from 9 AM to 8PM to play the game.
And we got to December 1941...

I never was able to play the full game afterwards.

On the other side of the spectrum, Quartermaster General lets you play the game in 2 hours, with 6 people.
As its name implies, you focus on supply, and cutting them to your opponent.
The game is card based with a very simple system: you play a single card very turn, then discard and refill your hand.
A battle card kills an opposing army near one of your forces. A build army card let you deploy an army where you can supply it.
Any army or fleet that cannot trace a continuous line of allied units to a supply center gets destroyed at the end of the turn.

There are also cards that provide ongoing benefits, but make you lose tempo when played, and force you to discard cards to activate (when your deck run dry, your country is ruined, you don't draw cards anymore, and lose an awful lot of victory points every turn).
Bomber cards make you discard a lot of cards.
Event cards are 1 time events that can do a lot (recruit 3 armies, kill one army and recruit one), but on specific regions.

The game flows quite well, and you have a lot of agonizing decisions to make.
Out of the 5 games we have played, only one has been won by the Axis, but it might be because the first expansion favors the Allies (it adds air units to the board). The second rebalances things by adding lots of non historical events (landKreuzers, Spain joining the Axis, the French fleet joining the allies...).

I really love the system, but it being card driven means that you really are constrained by your card draw. That ensures there are more variety to games than in Axis and Allies, but it can make some game frustrating (I just bombed 3 build army cards out of Italy in a single bombing run where I made him discard 4 cards).
There are 2 other games in the series:
The first one, Victory or Death (4 player game) focus on the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, and the second one, Quartermaster General 1914(5 player game) on the Great War.
I have not tried these, but I will definitely give them a try. I think 1914 is the better refined one, as it is the latest(and I think the engine will work even better for this war).

 

[Galdred]

I have played the WW1 version.
The ruleset is much better as each card can be used in 2 different ways:
By playing it or preparing it to support a later action:

This card can be played to implement the Imperial Austrian Landwehr action, or prepared to defend later in Vienna or Tyrol.

Each turn allows you to play one card and prepare one.
Preparing cards makes you stronger for later turns, but can deprieve you of very potent effects, so it is a hard decision every time.
Playing prepared cards also makes your deck run out of cards faster, which can be devastating:
I ended up with no card 5 turns before the end. I found it was a cool way to convey attrition. It really felt like I had no more men to send to the meatgrinder.

The game takes a bit longer than its older WW2 brother. It took us 3h for our first game, but it went to the last turn (while all our QMG WW2 games ended up because one side reached the victory trheshold), so it remained quite reasonable.

The ruleset is better, but it is WW1, so there is not as much fight over the oceans, which I liked very much, and the frontline does not move as much (which is fitting, but I prefered the fluider nature of QMG WW2). It makes it hard for me to recommend one over the other, but I would probably still pick QMG WW1 and wait for a second edition of QMG WW2 to add the preparation mechanism to the game.
Although another factor to consider is that QMG WW2 plays with 6, while QMG WW1 caps at 5.