Josef Švejk has been declared unfit for military service on grounds of idiocy. He has also, through a combination of this idiocy and something harder to name, managed to escape every consequence life has tried to impose on him. It is the morning of August 1914. Švejk wakes at home and hears about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Europe is days away from a war he has his own theories about. What exactly those theories are — and what Švejk does next — is for the player to discover.