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The Situation

the time is: April 1859

In 1859, having laid the diplomatic groundwork and secured France as an active ally, the Kingdom of Sardinia provoked a war with the Austrian Empire in order to achieve a long frustrated desire to unite all Italian speaking peoples into one, unified Italian state.  While initially not totally successful in achieving this goal, Sardinia and France drove Austria from Lombardy in North Central Italy and began the process known as the Risorgimento (Resurgence), or Italian unification movement.  Within two years, all of Italy with the exception of the Roman patrimony and Austria’s remaining Italian province of Venice were united under the House of Savoy in a new Kingdom of Italy. 

Prussia was not long in following this path to unification. 

Seeing his opportunity to both frustrate the Prussian liberals in their policy of curbing the Prussian monarchy and to provide them with the long sought after desire for German unity, Bismarck obtained appointment as Minister — President of Prussia and began the process of excluding Austria and France from what came to be called Germany.  Through a series of wars with Denmark, Austria, and France (often with the newly established Kingdom of Italy allied to Prussia), German unity was achieved when the Prussian King William II was crowned Kaiser Wilhelm I of the new German Empire at Versailles in 1871.

The Game

Age of Bismarck: The Unifications of Italy and Germany, 1859 – 1871 is a strategic, card-driven simulation which models these great unification campaigns and the nationalistic drives that gave birth to them.  Blending an active war fighting with a diplomatic warfare system, Age of Bismarck models the periods of hot war and the much more prevalent periods of cold war during this dynamic thirteen year period of European history.

Age of Bismarck harkons back to the SPI Power Politics brand of games, ushered into the modern era of gaming by using the unique card-driven system pioneered by Mark Herman in We the People.  The system allows a player to assume the role of Prussia, Sardinia, France, or Austria  to see if they can successfully blend war and peace to attain their national objectives — objectives which can and will conflict with those of the other nation-states involved.  The system also allows two and three player games, which challenges the player through the shifting of national alliances and the blending of nationalistic objectives.