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On this date in 1918, the German army began its final offensive of the First World War, the Spring Offensive, which our first release covers. In this article, we give an overview of the Spring Offensive, how the German Army fought it and how you can recreate the German tactics used in 1918: A First World War Miniatures Game.  By 1918, the war had stretched both Allied and Central powers to the breaking point. The morale of the allied powers had dropped significantly after the

Introduced in 1904, the Ordnance QF 18-pound Field Gun was rapidly installed as the standard field gun of the British army. This impressive piece of kit could lob a variety of ammunition types with an 84mm calibre to ranges of up to 10,000 metres.  By the time of the Armistice, over 3,000 18pdrs were in service on the Western Front, and between them they had used nearly 100 million rounds of ammunition, mostly shrapnel and HE. The 18pdr would remain in service through the int

We’ve released enough miniatures over the last few months to build up a complete army of British or German troops - and we’ve got an entire game system to play with them. But your games of 1918: Spring Offensive have been missing one crucial component: trenches. Until now. We’re incredibly proud to open the pre-orders for the first wave of our massive new system of modular trenches. Each piece is designed to fit together with every other piece, with the potential to build a h

The battlefields of the Great War were largely the backdrop to indiscriminate killing, men killed in their dozens by explosive shells fired from distant artillery batteries miles behind the front lines, or cut down by relentless bursts of machine gun fire. But these were far from the only menace on the Western Front. The German Army were early adopters of sniping techniques, quickly recognising the value of sharpshooters in trench warfare - useful for killing off junior offic

The latest incredible set-piece miniature for 1918: Spring Offensive has arrived - and it’s huge. The German Army entered the war with the Feldkanone 96, an effective, fast-firing 7.7cm field gun unleashed in 1896. This weapon fired on a largely flat trajectory and, though ill-suited to the siege warfare of the trenches, proved very effective against troops in the open. By 1918, many of these weapons had been replaced or upgraded with the 1916 version, which swapped the field

The German Army was the first to develop and test the flammenwerfer - the flamethrower - for combat during the great war. First employed near Verdun in 1915 to help clear trenches, the results were spectacular; no enemy soldier would willingly hold their ground with liquid flames spilling over the parapet. Those who were caught in the blast would die an agonising death. By 1918, the 3rd Guard Pioneer Battalion specialised in the use of flamethrowers, while most Stormtrooper b

The First World War truly was a global conflict - what began as an argument between decaying European empires slowly but surely dragged most of the rest of the world into the fighting, with action in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and even Asia. The classic, anglo-centric idea of the Great War, however, is the Western Front - which cut right across the entirety of Europe in a jagged line of muddy trenches stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland. This is the focus

When most people think of the Great War, they picture the endless, churned fields of France and Belgium, of beleaguered infantrymen desperately charging into a wall of lethal machine gun fire, and of endless lines of trenches pounded by distant artillery. All of that is accurate, but it’s not the whole picture. Cavalry - so deadly in earlier ages - were still deployed right to the very end of the conflict, albeit in a much reduced capacity. Tanks, meanwhile, started to see ac

"Artillery Conquers, Infantry Occupies. " Maj. Gen. J.F.C Fuller. Although cannons, mortars and other big guns had been in heavy use across European battlefields since the 15th century at least, it wasn’t until the Great War that the terrible dominance of indirect fire really came to be felt.  No game about the horrors of this conflict would be honest without the relentless thud of distant guns - and the very real threat they posed to life and limb - but the trick is to make

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen how 1918: A Miniatures Game works, from selecting forces and issuing orders to combat and morale . But, as more than a few old-fashioned generals discovered during the Great War, pitched battles can only get you so far… 1918 focuses on the Spring Offensive and the dying days of the war for several reasons, but one of the main ones is simple: by this point, military technology and tactics had evolved enough to make battles more fluid, mor

By 1918, morale was terrible for every soldier on every front in each nation. After four long, grinding years of war and death, no man was immune to despair. And yet, the great powers still battled. Morale is a key element in most tabletop wargames, but it comes to the fore especially in a simulation of the First World War. And it need not even take much death before a side begins to waver - horrific innovations like the tank, the machine gun and mustard gas reaped a heavy ps

So far in our round-up of how to play 1918, we’ve taken an overall look at the game , seen how to pick a platoon and worked out how to issue orders . Today, the rubber meets what’s left of the road after four years of sustained artillery bombardment: we’re looking at the Tactical Phase. You enter the Tactical Phase after every unit has been issued an order. Players now take it in turns to activate their units, starting with the ones which have successfully received Orders an

Each game of 1918 simulates a tiny snapshot of a much larger battle - two companies doing battle over a small section of trench during a wider engagement stretching on perhaps for miles in either direction off the tabletop, but it can also represent the smaller platoon actions - from cutting the barbed wire at midnight, to capturing enemy prisoners and raiding supplies. As we saw in our overview of the game , there are usually five or six turns in 1918, each split into three

Last week, we explained the basics of how to play 1918: Spring Offensive. A platoon-level simulation of the final months of the First World War, the game - at present! - brings four historically accurate forces to the tabletop: the British Empire, the German Empire, the French Republic and the freshly arrived American Expeditionary Force. This is no power fantasy: every man is roughly as physically capable as another, while your officers aren’t mighty heroes defeating a dozen

It is 1918. The war of stalemate has ended, and a new mode of warfare is taking shape. The armies that have suffered so long and so brutally during gruelling years of mud, blood and trenches have been thrown into motion with new strategies, advanced technologies and innovative tactics hard won from the long struggle of industrialised warfare. Despite being close to exhaustion, both the Allied Powers and the Central Powers will conduct ambitious new campaigns that cover more g

Whether you knew them as Tommies, Limeys or les Rosbifs, the humble British rifleman fought and died for his country by the hundreds of thousands. By 1918, the Great War had entered its final phase - the violent shock of the Imperial German ‘Spring Offensive’ catching British forces on the hop. Matters had just about settled into an attritional stalemate of trench warfare when the Germans debuted their new Stormtrooper tactics - elite soldiers trained to punch through and ove

The latest reinforcements for 1918: A First World War Miniatures Game  are here to strike fear into the hearts of the Allied Forces: elite Stormtroopers for the German Imperial Army. Hand-picked for their skill, aggression and fearlessness, the Stormtroopers were crack troops wielding the best gear the German army could provide in order to overwhelm the enemy under the press of a sudden shock assault. Often attacking from the flank or the rear, they used infiltration tactics

Welcome to www.warfulcrumgames.co.uk , the home of our first miniatures game 1918: A First World War Miniatures Game. We launched 1918 earlier this year and were blown away by the support we received, and felt that the time was right to launch properly. This website will contain all our products, both digital and physical - with any STLs printed and fulfilled by our licensed UK printing partner Feudal Forge Foundry. In the store now, you'll be able to pre-order the 1918: Spri

With the launch of our website, we are also taking pre-orders for our core rulebook for 1918: A First World War Miniatures game - 1918: Spring Offensive, a 222-page hardback, full colour tome that contains the Core and Advanced Rules for 1918, alongside Force Lists for the American Expeditionary Force Infantry Division (early), British Infantry Division, French Infantry Division (early) and German Intervention Division. You'll find some of the miniatures for our British range

The British Empire - the wall at which the hammerblow of the German Spring Offensive lands. The core of this formation is the British Infantry Division, and in this guide, we’ll cover how to collect a British force for 1918 using the Force Lists and Unit Profiles in the Spring Offensive book. Choosing a Force List and Doctrine Firstly, we’ll need to decide what kind of force we want to field and how it will fight. The Spring Offensive book contains one Force List for the Brit