Verdun: A Dagger at The Heart of France (After-action Report)

16 Feb, 2026

I recently finished a game of Verdun: Dagger at the Heart of France by Marc Miller (who also wrote Traveller). I played as the German Empire, and my opponent was Scribble of Scribbles & Horrors, playing the French. The game took us four sessions to complete at a rate of roughly 1 turn per hour¹ for a total of roughly 15 hours.

The game covers a single scenario: an asymmetric struggle where the Imperial German Army is trying to take the city of Verdun.² Germans can win a tactical victory by scoring more kills than losses, but must take the city in its entirety for a full strategic victory. The French can win by doing better than a 1:1 kill ratio, or 2:1 for a strategic victory.

I managed to win a tactical victory (268 points of French combat power eliminated vs. 72 points of German). However, Scribble successfully prevented me from taking (or even seriously threatening) the city of Verdun.

The Battle

Session 1, turns 1-5

As the German player, I began with the initiative & substantial superiority in troops & firepower. I consciously decided that I would try to push the center, following the river toward Verdun. I massed my medium artillery near the center (obscured in this image by green cubes -- see the end of this post), and concentrated fire in huge focused barrages that maximized the odds of disrupting or eliminating their targets.

Scribble quickly withdrew toward the second trench line, a stronger defensive position by far, but by the end of the session I had managed to break through near the river. I forget if it was this session or next, but I was able to seize an ungarrisoned fort & sabotage it, netting some sweet victory points.

Session 2, turns 6-10

I continued advancing, widening the breakthrough in the center and threatening Verdun's inner trench line. These advances were fraught, however, with lots of turnover as attacking troops were disrupted & swapped out for fresh reinforcements. I was slow to advance my artillery batteries & (in retrospect) missed out on some opportunities to advance further.

During this session, I made progress on the right flank, forcing Scribbles to withdraw to defend a treeline. This felt good but did little to move me toward the goal of taking Verdun.

Session 3, turns 11-12

This session was short because we spent too much time yapping. My advance stalled out, though I was able to push another row of hexes deeper into the center salient. Scribble garrisoned the forts in the top left, negating my plan to sneak troops around & sabotage them.

Session 4, turns 13-15

I continued pushing the center hoping to break through toward Verdun, but by the end of turn 13 it was clear that strategic victory was out of the question. In these later turns, I started exhausting all of my artillery ammunition per turn -- no point in hoarding.

In the final round all of my attacks failed, but Scribble suffered some catastrophically unlucky counterattacks, losing something like 6 infantry units.

The final game state is below.

Reflections

This is (I think) the fourth tabletop hex & counter game I've played seriously, and certainly the longest. I'm very grateful to Scribble for providing the game & being down to play it.

Simplicity

V:DaTHoF is less complex than other hex & counter games I've looked at. There are really only two types of unit (infantry and artillery) & each has a single primary combat matrix. The terrain rules are simple & elegant, as is movement. There are a few crunchy edge case rules (spotting, supply depots, special rules for a train tunnel) but it's generally very easy to play.

I lack the theoretical fluency to articulate this fully, but I've found that a simple, elegant system allows one to focus on the strategies allowed by it more directly -- players can't get an advantage by acquiring intricate system mastery or by exploiting edge cases. It's why Diplomacy is (imo) a more satisfying strategy game than Twilight Imperium, and it applied here as well. There are only a few types of 'move', but lots of nuance to how once can use those moves effectively.

Attrition

The rules of V:DaTHoF do a great job of simulating a war of attrition. The terrain rules & combat tables heavily advantage defenders -- attacking with anything less than a 4:1 advantage is basically suicidal. On a broader level, the provisions for reinforcements make it very difficult to eliminate more divisions than will enter the battle next turn.

Despite that, the battle felt surprisingly dynamic. Generally, when I claimed territory it was not because I eliminated large numbers of troops or executed a clever maneuver, but because I was able to concentrate firepower on a well-chosen location that, when taken, made other locations vulnerable to encirclement and thus untenable.

Artillery

Artillery is the key to succeeding at this game, but its role is asymmetrical. The Germans start with more ammunition & a larger number of powerful 8-8-3 medium artillery. The French have fewer shells and a predominance of 5-5-4 field guns, but also have fixed fortifications that can fire as field guns.

My strategy for the Germans was to rely on maximal firepower (i.e. focusing six guns at a time to use the best row of the artillery matrix) to all but guarantee the disruption or elimination of a French unit. As the Germans, infantry attacks must be declared before artillery and resolved after, and can't be called off. Thus, being as certain as possible that a bombardment will succeed is imperative.

On the other hand, Scribble had good results with a more sporadic targeting strategy. Much of the French firepower is tied up in fixed forts with poor range, so it's difficult to mass fires, but since the French are attacking less often, the role of artillery is less to create small breakthroughs and more to disrupt German units, forcing the German player to withdraw them & rotate in fresh units, slowing down the rate of advance.

Terrain

Terrain plays a huge role in Verdun (I assume this is true of most hex wargames, though to a varying degree -- iirc Hastings: 1066 did not emphasize it nearly as much, save for cavalry charges). Attacks (both infantry and artillery) are rolled by comparing a 2d6 roll to a matrix, and terrain penalties are applied to the die result, meaning that the entire bell curve shifts. Additionally, terrain penalties are always calculated in favor of the defender. If the defender has even a sliver of high ground and the attacker even a sliver of low ground, the attack is treated as uphill and takes a -2.

There are also trench lines printed on the map. These are completely static (no trench-building or entrenchment for units that occupy the same hex multiple turns) and provide a big bonus to withstanding artillery. Interestingly, it only takes one participating infantry unit on the other side of a trench-line to neutralize its advantage, so they were relatively less impactful for infantry combat.

Trees have the (often frustrating) effect of negating zone of control around a unit, so it's possible to use trees to move great distances behind enemy lines. The outer lines of defense around Verdun are well-wooded, and this is generally an advantage for the German player -- gaps in the French lines can be exploited easily.

Finally, the location of the French fortresses gradually shifts the advantage toward the French player as the frontlines push toward Verdun.

Winning Strategies?

Scribble & I discussed this at length during and after the game. Maybe someday we'll find another 15 hours to test out our ideas, but for now the following is just speculation.

• The French player doesn't have enough troops to properly defend the outer trench line, particularly given the effect of woods on ZOC. Moreover, the outer line is out of range of the French guns. Although the German player does suffer attrition when made to fight for the space between the 1st & 2nd trench lines, it might be more advantageous to abandon the outer defenses immediately.
• The Germans medium artillery is much more effective than their field artillery, so it makes sense to concentrate their guns on a chosen axis of advance. It's possible (with luck) to blast a hole in the French lines 3 or 4 hexes wide, which is tough for the French player to fill without weakening other sectors. However, a German player pursuing this approach will have to choose whether to focus on the left, right, or center of the map. The center & left are closer to the ultimate goal of Verdun, but the center involves advancing along the river (penalizing attacks due to low ground) & open terrain on the left makes one very vulnerable to artillery. Having tried the center this game, I'd be interested in trying a game that focuses on the left flank.

Etc.

We used 2mm wooden cubes from a different board game to mark the targets of declared attacks, and artillery pieces that had already fired. This was a big quality-of-life improvement.

Tabletop hex & counter games are extremely slow. Each session, we had to spend at least an hour painstakingly assembling the gamestate from photos & written notes. Each turn took about an hour. But the slowness is part of the fun -- when I play computerized strategy games, I often get impatient & fail to consider the situation in detail. When I start losing, I'll often just retry the scenario. Playing with physical counters & a human opponent is a lot different: each move is more considered, and there's more of a sense of fidelity to follow the game to its conclusion. Against a human, losing well is still interesting & rewarding.

#session-report #wargame