Wargame Wednesday - The History of Panzerblitz

 

A short post today with a link to a pretty thorough history of Panzerblitz - it's origins, early development, and eventual publishing history. Panzerblitz was a tremendously influential game as the first big popular tactical level game and one that would be in print and selling copies for  20+ years as well as spawning multiple direct and not-so-direct descendants. If you were playing wargames in the 70's and 80's you likely played this game and Panzer Leader and some of the other related games as well. I still have my battered copy I picked up 40 years ago and break it out every once in a while to touch on those early experiences again. If you are at all interested in the background of the game here is a really nice trove of information:

Link: An Informal History of the Development of PanzerBlitz

Wargame Wednesday - Storming the Gap: World at War 85

 

I haven't played a lot of tabletop Cold War era games. I think the only other land combat one I own is Last Battle from GDW which was closely tied to Twilight 2000 but it used all the latest Cold War-era equipment. I do have the Fleet series games from Victory Games and those were great but not at all focused on the landward side of things. There's Twilight Struggle of course but it's not exactly a traditional hex and counter type conflict simulation. There have been various computer and miniature games in this area over the years ( like the old "something 1985" series from SSI) but if we're talking strictly about board wargames this set is a little new for me.

Yeah, that's the one I had!

There were two main reasons to start digging in  to this particular game. First - the scale and the period are both of interest. As mentioned I realized this period was a bit of a gap in my experience and in my collection so I started looking at Cold War-era games. There are a fair number of options but this one chooses a specific year so we know what was definitely available and what might have been rushed into service or available in prototype form. That's a nice touch for an otherwise speculative game. 

It's also a platoon-level game which means the counters represent tank and infantry platoons which is the same scale Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader used way back when. This gives it a nice tactical feel that allows for differences between different types of equipment (like an Abrams vs. a Leopard 2 vs. a T-72) without needing to worry about details like facing and front/side/rear/top armor values. I have miniatures and some computer games for extreme detail and there is always MBT (from Avalon Hill and now GMT) if I want that. So this slightly larger view of things still feels close but should not bog down in minutia. 

Additionally this is a Lock 'N Load game which means it should be very well supported. I do not have any of their other games but they publish multiple lines of well-regarded games from Nations at War (WW2 platoon-level) to Lock N' Load Tactical  - Modern and WW2 lines - for that up-close scale of game. Their games look great, have been around for a few years now, and seem to be pretty widely played. 

There is a fair amount of stuff out for it now.

Finally the rules used in this game are refreshingly different - there is no CRT, for example. The numbers you need are right there on the counter and tell you either how many dice to roll for an attack or what you need to roll on one to succeed with whatever you are doing. Now the counters are a little busy and all of those colors and shapes and superscripts/subscripts mean something so I can see it taking a little while to learn all of the details but I appreciate the drive to put everything you need right out there on the board.

The other interesting rules element is the way it uses cards. It is similar to a card-driven game like C&C Ancients but the deck tells you which specific unit to activate, not what actions you can take - this is a huge difference if you've played any of the C&C games. There are cards for each formation in a scenario plus a few others might be added in like close air support or electronic warfare to represent the almost random appearance of certain assets. Also, you will run through the entire deck until the -second- "end operations" card is drawn which means this phase is over for the turn and the deck will be reshuffled for the next turn. This means that while you may not get to activate all of your units (like you would in a more traditional non-card-driven game) you will likely be able to do more in a turn than in a C&C turn so less of your army will feel like it's sitting there doing nothing. 

Finally there is a lot of detail in the game - missiles, reactive armor, helicopters, minefields, and more. It's all handled in a pretty intuitive way once you get the basics of the system so I don't feel like it's missing anything significant. This is a second edition of a prior game line so they had a few years to work out the kinks and it shows. 

Almost hilariously there is an associated novel line set in this ... universe(?) ... as well, so if you're missing your Team Yankee or Tom Clancy novels here's an outlet. I mean, RPG's generating books is old hat but this is a hex and counter board wargame ... well, OK ... and yes, I will probably check out the first one at least just to see what it's about. 

So I am looking forward to getting my hands dirty with this one - I'll post about it after I have some more actual play experience to share. 

Wargame Wednesday - Catching Up on Years of Neglect

 

I used to play board wargames, also known as hex-and-counter wargames, quite a bit. Panzerblitz was my first - like it was for so many people - and from there I moved into Panzer Leader and then Squad Leader. Star Fleet Battles also entered my life around this time along with Starfire and Car Wars and Ogre so it was not just historical games. This was the early 80's so Avalon Hill reigned supreme in this arena with SPI, Steve Jackson, Yaquinto (Ironclads! Mythology! Swashbuckler!), and Task Force all in the mix as well. 

Over time Squad Leader became Advanced Squad Leader and squeezed out most other historical games for us. SPI was bought out by TSR and then many of it's main people started Victory Games and cranked out a whole lot of interesting things like the "Fleet" games, Ambush, and Tokyo Express among many others. Battletech entered the mix as something much easier to put together and play compared to SFB and ASL. Miniatures became more of a thing during this time thanks to Battlesystem and Warhammer Fantasy and, yes, Battletech and SFB too. Now many RPG's were being played as well but we were in junior high and high school and just had so much more time that it was easy to work in all three parts of the "triad" - RPGs, miniature games, and board wargaming. I never felt like these things were competing with each other for our time.

As time went on - though I did not notice it - the board wargames began to be squeezed out. Now things were still fine in the first part of the 90's but as we all grew up, moved out, got full time jobs, and started families our game time did thin out. RPGs maintained their primary place when we could get together as a big group. Miniatures, mainly 40K and Epic with a sprinkling of Battletech dominated the two-man gatherings. The boardgames dried up almost completely other than the occasional 6+ players game of Civilization or Twilight Imperium. Avalon Hill died, Victory Games died, Task Force died, and Steve Jackson went heavily into GURPS and then Munchkin and it felt like I didn't know any of the remaining players and didn't care a ton for what they were putting out.

About 10-15 years ago I got exposed to some of the new games at the time and it was a revelation. Card-driven games, more area-movement games, impulse-type turn sequences instead of rigid I-go-you-go systems ... there was a ton of good, interesting stuff happening. So I did step back in, picking up and playing Command & Colors, Combat Commander, and some older games I had loved like Ambush and Battle Hymn. I also dove into Federation Commander for a while and tried to make that a recurring thing again. 

After a year or two this faded though I did keep a very irregular C&C Ancients game going with Blaster for years and I did pay more attention to what was going on in the business taking the GMT newsletter email etc. I just didn't get to play a whole lot so I didn't keep up all that closely or buy much of anything. 

This past year though ... I started looking into Battletech again  - with all the Kickstarter noise coming from them how could I not? So There are new Battletech products on my shelf for the first time in years. That helped to get things rolling. I also started looking into games that matched up with whatever history I was reading at the time and realized I had missed a lot of good games. So I resolved to start rebuilding the wargame collection driven largely by what looked good and had decent reviews. For example, I watched "A Bridge Too Far" for the first time in years and ended up with multiple games on Operation Market-Garden. There are a lot of games on this section of the war so I tried to focus on 3 or 4 that seemed to cover it well ... perhaps 5.

I always had a lot of fun playing WW2 tactical games starting with Squad Leader and I still had the Combat Commander sets but there has been an explosion of this kind of game so I have been stepping into as many of them as possible - Old School Tactical, Band of Brothers, Conflict of Heroes, The Last Hundred Yards ... there are a lot to choose from. I also decided to rebuild my ASL collection (sold off in the 90's) and I've done a pretty thorough job there. I even branched out into the more recent ASL starter sets to help me re-learn the finer points of the game. 

So that's what prompted me to start this as a regular thing - I plan on stepping back into this part of the hobby and I plan to post my notes here as I do. Who knows, someone out there may be in a similar situation - "how is this new game different from Squad Leader?" Well, that's the kind of thing I can talk about here. More to come ...