Hey Dave.
I finished my first full game of 1914 this past weekend with 2 buddies. It was a lot of fun. We finished the game in about 9.5 hours (one completely new player) and it ended with the Allies conceding defeat to the CP. It could have gone one for about 2 more hours I estimated but I couldn’t convince the Allies to play it out. We got to turn 7.
My thoughts:
I’m not sure why so many people on these forums are complaining that the allies have some huge slanted advantage? I can see a lot of parity in the game and believe both powers have the opportunity to win the game.
We decided not to use the optional Russian Revolution rule but the conditions would have been satisfied by the end of turn 5 (though there was quite a stack in Russia, 40+ men).
The game mechanics are great and provide opportunities for a lot of new strategies, very interesting.
Once again the production of the game is terrible! This game is not playable out of the box. We added chips (love those little coloured chips but do you think they could give us 2x as many please?), used some IPC’s from another set (actually the FMG supplemental cash, a rip off for $10 but it did the trick since Wizards of the Coast are too stupid to give us any), used a generic national production chart from Global (how do they expect us to manage 16 roundels on the stupid little chart in the Sahara desert??? WTF?? Really?). I also took some clippings from the inadequate rule book and made our own quick reference cards, which included things like the combat and movement values of the naval units.