Don’t make the mistake of calling Dual Powers: Revolution 1917 a wargame. I learned that lesson the hard way. Like 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Fort Sumter, Dual Powers is about what happens before the war — in effect, a pre-wargame. This is the jockeying, the shakeout, the period when everybody decides who they’ll sidle up to when the shooting starts. Even better that Brett Myers has selected a topic I’ve yet to see explored. With the February Revolution out of the way and Tsar Nicholas II off the throne, Petrograd has settled into an uneasy truce between the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik Party. Surely such an arrangement will last more than a few months.

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