Module:Gathering Storm

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DECKS, FLAGS AND TILES

The event deck and discard pile are located in the northwest corner of the map. Drawn cards have a menu option to be returned to the discard pile. The discard pile has a menu option to reshuffle into the draw deck.

The purge deck is located near the Russian flag on the map. The Great Purge card begins out of the deck, near the Rhineland. There is a menu option to send it to the Purge deck. You should not return the previous turn's card to the deck until you have drawn the next.

Each power has a large stack of its flag markers near its flag on the map. Flag markers have a menu option to destroy them, or to convert them into another country's flag.

The Tile pools (three face-up and one face-down) are in the North Sea, to the right of the Event Deck. A drawn tile has a menu option to return it to the appropriate face-up pile. When the face-down pile has less than 10 tiles, the numbers on ALL tiles will turn red. This is a reminder to restock the face-down pile with five tiles of each denomination. Each of the face-up piles has a menu option to send 5 tiles to face-down.

HANDLING CIVIL WAR

Per the rules, you should draw a tile to determine Spain's proximity to civil war at the start of the game. The intended procedure for manipulating the Civil War chits is you right click the top of the pile on the map when an event occurs and send it to the pool. The "5" chit starts on top of the pile, and it takes 5 events to trigger civil war. So the starting chit pile serves as a sort of "count-down". Removing chits from the initial pile as national events occur also populates the eventual chit pool for that country's draws. When the "1" chit is sent to the pool, civil war begins, and the pool containing the chits acts as a random-draw deck. After a chit is drawn during the turn, it should either be placed on the civil war track (if the threshold was met) or sent back to the pool via menu option (if the threshold was not met). When all five counters have been held out of the pool, civil war ends.

RESEARCH RESULTS AND RP MARKERS

All research result counters, including Balance of Power/Garrison markers, support markers, intelligence results and activity counters, are on the appropriate space of the research charts. There is a home-made RP counter (looks like a beaker) on EACH row of the research charts. This is a "spinner" that starts out saying "Unfunded" and can be incremented to display any game turn. When you put the first RP into a project, you should slide the RP marker over to the first box, and use the menu options to mark the turn. When you subsequently ADD an RP, you should clone the previous RP using the menu option of the same name, and then position the new marker in the next space with the turn adjusted (you can leave the previous RP in the space it occupies). In this way, each box on the research charts will contain a counter indicating the turn an RP was assigned to it.

BALANCE OF POWER STATUS

Each of the Balance of Power sheets' numerical markers, and the Battleship Race marker, are "spinners" that can be adjusted with menu options to show the current value without replacing the counter.

ACTIVITY COUNTERS

The activity counters have their own window. Activity counters gained during play are placed near the location that activates them (e.g. a minor country, a factory space, etc). All activity counters have menu options to flip them over and to return them to their holding window.

There is a single Anti-Comintern activity counter. Its value can be adjusted (1 - 3) via menu option.

COUNTER-MIX AND PALETTE

Markers for miscellaneous diplomatic and support modifiers are either placed in the minor country that activates them, next to the owning power's large flag on the map or on the owning power's scenario card. The "Greece/Yugoslavia" activity counters are placed near the common border of those two countries.

The Counter Tray window has all the pieces in the counter-mix, in correct quantity to reflect what is provided in the printed version of the game, minus whatever units and counters start in play. Mobilized units should be pulled from here.

While you can also use the Palette to create any piece in the game, doing so will generally violate the counter-mix limits.

CHARTS

The Charts window contains a number of useful game charts and tables, some reformatted or distilled from the rules.

MAP NOTES

I prefer to detach the main map window from the application frame (File->Preferences->General->UNCHECK "Use combined application window (requires restart)?".

The module uses the version of the map available from the GMT website, which is unfortunately not the production version. It is missing the small color-coded map showing the regions of Europe, and also missing the victory points (number in a red circle) for each potential aggression target. I have manually added the VP information.

Players

 * dwcasper@live.com@Dave Casper