War doesn’t change. The mechanics might, but the principals remain the same.

The carnage of The Great War was foreseeable if anyone bothered to look. The Crimean War saw the first wide usage of the rifle equipped with the Minnie ball. This weapon had a significantly greater range than the smooth ore muskets of the Napoleonic era. This weapon became the basic arm of the American Civil War which started out with a strong Napoleonic flavor and ended with trench warfare and Gatling guns. Barbed wire saw widespread use in the 1870s. Machine guns, smokeless bolt action rifles and barbed wire were all present in the 2nd Boer War (1899 to 1902) and Spanish American War (1898).

Trains and telegraphs were used in all of these wars, Crimea and forward, and had a huge influence on the conduct of all the prior wars. There are several authors who contend that the Great War was inevitable due to extensive pre-War mobilization planning. Each country developed extensive plans to call up the standing army and reservists and mobilize them for war. These timetables were critical and once activated took on a life of their own leaving leaders and diplomats no time to try and negotiate a peace.

The Great War did see fewer casualties than the Second World War but the difference isn’t the numbers but the perception. The huge casualties of WW1 dwarfed prior wars and there was so little gained by those casualties. Battles were fought literally over yards of ground and it all seemed so hopeless and pointless to the participants that trench warfare has become a synonym for that futility.

To @warzans point that you game the parts that are interesting, there’s quite a lot happening. The naval battles have commerce raiders like the German ship SMS Emden of the East Asian Squadron and the East Asia Squadron itself as it tries to return to Germany via South Pacific and South American route. Or the exploits of SMS Goeben (made into a board game years ago by SPI called The Flight of the Goeben) who fled to Turkey and was “interned” leading Turkey to be drawn into the war, the Gallipoli campaign, the closing down of Russian access to the Mediterranean, helped start the Russian revolution, contributed to the current Ukraine crisis and may be in part responsible for the Trump/Russian collusion investigations.

The most interesting part of the war, in game terms, is the aerial war. Flying in death traps literally made of wood, canvas and piano wire, more pilots were killed by their own planes than enemy action. Life expectancy varied from 18 hours to six weeks, depending upon who had the technological advantage. Wings of Glory and the old Avalon Hill game Richthofen’s War are two examples I’ve played but there are plenty of others.

Here’s something to contemplate. The Wright brothers first flew in 1903. The HMS Dreadnaught wasn’t launched until 1906 and when it did, made every other ship in the world obsolete. The German battleship Ostfriesland wasn’t sunk by aircraft until 1921 in the famous Billy Mitchell bomber tests which in turn made every battleship obsolete. But no one knew that until 1942 and the Battle of the Coral Sea.