Trench Engr.: press kit

The General’s compliments. He’d like the line moved forward four hundred yards by tea. He appreciates it’s raining. He’s indoors.

Trench Engr. is a real-time strategy game about the trenches of the First World War, and you are the trench engineer. Dig trenches, string wire and drag attack arrows to the enemy line. The staff turns every line into orders for thousands of men, who dig what you drew, hold it, and go over the top when the whistle blows. Every one of them is simulated.

The tools

Dig fire, support and communication trenches, then add dugouts and machine-gun nests and keep it all repaired.
Wire the front. Work parties lay it, and they work faster in the dark.
Request a barrage on a point, along a line or creeping ahead of an attack: high explosive, shrapnel, gas or smoke.
Request an attack by dragging an arrow to the enemy line. Set zero hour and the creeping barrage, then send the waves over at the whistle.
Requisition companies, machine guns, guns and tanks when the line needs them, as the year allows.

Headquarters is on the line

The field telephone rings with requests: a communication trench back to Carnoy by 11:30, a trench repaired before the General’s inspection, ten men to carry the Colonel’s piano. Take a job and Headquarters pays in materiel, men and favour. Turn it down and your men stay where you need them. Every caller speaks a gibberish of his own, from the ADC and the General to Q Branch, the signaller, the Sergeant and the gunner.

Report to Headquarters

Every battle ends with your report, typed and stamped: the works, the line, the requests met and any commendations (“Mentioned in dispatches for a trench of exceptional straightness”). The casualties are listed plainly.

Three campaigns, 28 battles

The British campaign runs from Mons in 1914 to Amiens in 1918, by way of Second Ypres, a night raid, the Somme, Flers-Courcelette, Messines, Passchendaele, Cambrai and the German spring offensive. The French one goes from the Marne in 1914 back to the Marne in 1918, through the Yser, Champagne, Verdun and the Chemin des Dames. The German one starts at Rossignol in the Ardennes in 1914 and ends before the Siegfried-Stellung in 1918. Each army has its own Headquarters, voices and paperwork.

In skirmish any of the three fights on seven kinds of generated battlefield against seven enemy commanders, who play by your rules and see only what their own side sees. Every week brings a new Operation, the same for every player.

The field

Soft pixel art seen from straight above, as an observer in a balloon would see it. Mud, rain, fog, snow, gas and night. The shell holes stay where they were blown, and so do the fallen. The largest battles put over 3,000 soldiers on the field.