From: Robert Dushay Panzer Battles was originally published in Strategy & Tactics #73, 1979. While I didn't care for it at the time, a re-examination twenty-five years later shows a rather decent little tactical armor game. I was (and largely remain) a tactical armor wargamer of the Panzerblitz school, and in the 1970s I didn't care for SPI's offerings in the genre. I thought Kampfpanzer felt too cheesy and limited; Panzer '44 and MechWar '77 were overly complex; October War was all but incomprehensible. For me, SPI's big hit was Firefight, which I felt did a wonderful job of gaming modern tank to tank combat, with Avalon Hill's Tobruk as a more complex favorite. Now, many years later, I have some space, and I've been pulling my old games out of storage and playing them solitaire, tracing the evolution of SPI's thinking on tactical armor games. Kampfpanzer was simple, and may not demonstrate much that is accurate about how armor was used in the 1930s, but it may have acheived the goal of showing why generals of the 1930s misjudged armor's potential--and why the blitzkrieg was going to overwhelm such thinking. (With minor modifications, I think Kampfpanzer is a good solitaire game.) October War, once my Panzerblitz blinders had been removed, had a great deal of nuance and really improved the Kampfpanzer/Panzer '44/Mechwar '77 system. I particularly liked how the game handled platoons and individual vehicles at the same time. But after only three scenarios solitaire, I grew tired of the static map and limited counter mix. It was time to move on. I gritted my teeth and unpacked Panzer Battles. I've never heard a good word about this game, and I can still remember my first impressions. Three small cheesy-looking maps. Only three simple scenarios. More informational counters than unit counters. A complex combat system that made it difficult to compare units to each other at a glance. Tables, tables, tables. After playing one of the scenarios, I got a lot more interested. While I'm not a great judge of either historical or tactical accuracy, nor of good games vs. bad ones, I think Panzer Battles had a lot for the tactical armor gamer. The three scenarios were "Action near Gazala, May 26, 1942," "Arracourt, September 20, 1944," and "Defense of the Berlin Highway, March 22, 1945." Unit types were limited. Gazala featured a German force of Pz IIIs and IVs and a recon platoon of Pz IIs against British Grants, Crusaders, and Crusader CS tanks. Arracourt featured American M4 Shermans and armored infantry units against German Pz IVhs and two 88s. Berlin Highway was purely T34/85 vs. Panther action. Like October War, the game covered individual vehicles and larger organizational units in a simple manner. Each counter represented a platoon, with a numbered informational marker placed under it to show the number of tanks currently in the platoon. A number of platoons were organized into a company, and each platoon in the company had to stay within one or two hexes of other platoons (depending on the nation in question). Companies were frequently organized into battalions, which shared a common morale rating. Panzer Battles used an integrated turn sequence, where player two wrote down his orders for his units, player one moved, combat occurred, player one wrote down his orders, player two moved and combat occurred again. Order writing was very simple. A player gave one of three orders to each company: Bound, Overwatch, or Bounding Overwatch. (Two additional orders, Rally and Withdraw, were used after a unit's morale was reduced.) Panzer Battles did not include the (in)famous Si-move pads; SPI recommended using scrap paper and even suggested using the honor system(!). Simply, a bound command meant all units in the company were committed to move when the friendly movement segment occured. Overwatch meant no unit could move, but all could fire. Bounding Overwatch meant that at least one platoon in the company had to move, while the rest could fire. (The designer, Thomas Walczyk, said that while WWII tankers did not use these terms, they used the same sorts of actions.) This system combined the excitement of simultaneous movement with the simplicity of turn-taking. At first blush, the combat system appeared to be difficult, but in retrospect, it was not that hard. Vehicle counters had four stats on them: a profile code and three numbers. Profile referred to how easy the vehicle was to hit, taking into account vehicle size and degree of sloped armor. The remaining three numbers referred to armor protection from the front, from the side/rear, and the vehicle's movement allowance. Offensive factors were found in "data cards" in the rules, where each vehicle's main gun was given a gun type rating from one to four, and a penetration value from five to ten. The gun type was abstract, but as it got better, the gun was more likely to hit. The penetration value referred to how well the weapon penetrated armor. Units with Overwatch or Bounding Overwatch commands could fire as enemy units moved (opportunity fire), in response to enemy units firing (overwatch fire), or during the joint combat phase at the end of the movement phase. The fire resolution process requires some explanation. First, assuming clear line of sight, the attacker cross-indexed range, gun type, and target profile on a table, getting an abstract combat strength as the result. This abstract combat strength translated to a probability table, based on the number of tanks in the firing platoon. The player rolled two dice on this probability table, resulting in a score of zero to three, roughly corresponding to the number of hits scored on the target platoon. Each hit was then modified based on the penetration value of the attacker's weapon (modified by the range to the target), the defender's armor, the degree of cover the defender had, and so on. Loss modification ranged from -1 (a hit becomes ineffectual, a "bounce-off,") to +1 (a hit becomes more effective because the weakness of the defender's armor). While this sounds horribly complicated, once understood, the system was fairly fast-moving, requiring a glance at two tables, a roll of two dice, and a roll of a single die for loss modification. The system was analogous to Avalon Hill's Tobruk, with less detail for faster game play. I thought Panzer Battles' system gave a good sense of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the guns and armor of the different vehicles. The main lessons Panzer Battles taught were basic. Tanks are very vulnerable on the flank; a frontal charge is usually suicidal; technically superior enemies must be swarmed and taken on the flank; concealing terrain is your friend; and once engaged, it is very difficult to withdraw successfully from combat. The fun of the game was in the head to head comparisons of different vehicles. The Gazala scenario was interesting to contrast to Tobruk's opening scenario. Both featured a handful of Grants against a massive amount of German armor, but differed in a number of historical details, such as date, time, and unit designations. Tobruk's scenario had nine Grant tanks facing an assortment of PzIII h's, j's, and IV e's. Panzer Battles had twelve Grants (four platoons) facing PzIII's (type not specified), PzIVe's, and PzII's. Happily for the British, the Grants were soon joined by sixteen Crusader IIs as reinforcements, along with two nearly useless Crusader C.S. tanks. In Tobruk, the Grant's frontal armor holds up well to the Germans, although the turret ring and tracks are vulnerable. The Grant 75, historically described as a "nasty surprise" for the Germans, rarely does any damage, given the relatively low firing rate and the low probability of hitting a vulnerable area. In Panzer Battles, there are no turret ring or track hits. The Grants are virtually invulnerable from the front unless the Germans get very close, and the 75 has real hitting power and is much more effective than the 37. This is the first tactical game I've ever played where the Grant shows itself to be anything better than an uparmored, slower moving Honey. On the other hand, the 2-lbr guns of the Crusaders are as ineffectual against the Germans as the histories describe, and their thin armor makes them worthless in a head-to-head engagement. Their main advantages are their low profile, making them hard to hit, and their higher speed to try for a flank shot. The scenario was a lot of fun solitaire, with each side carefully trying to flank the other. Gazala was an excellent introductory game. The Defense of the Berlin Highway, on the other hand, is a two-player cat and mouse game. After nearly four playings, I was never able to force a German victory. Oh, the Panthers are magnificent, alright. Their slight superiority in gun type, penetration value, and armor protection makes them all but impervious to the Soviets from the front, but the massive amounts of Soviet armor simply overwhelms them and sweeps them away. I believe this scenario would be far more challenging if the Soviets didn't know where the Panthers were, so the Germans could take them by surprise, and possibly retreat an exposed Panther before it is surrounded and pounded. The third scenario, Arracourt, was both more interesting and more frustrating. The introduction of elevation and terrain makes for a much more interesting board, but the Shermans are hard-pressed to flank the Pz IVs without getting their own flank turned by the second Pz IV company. Once more, I think this scenario would be far better in a two-player contest than solitaire. Panzer Battles had its flaws. While pure armor head to head can be fun, I wanted very much to see how the system would handle combined arms. The Arracourt scenario did very little of that: the German 88 was almost always wiped out by American off board artillery long before the infantry could arrive to see what it could do. Once the 88 was gone, American Infantry had little reason to dismount from their halftracks. I thought the scenarios did not mesh well with the articles in the associated S&T magazine, largely because of mismatched scales: Panzer Battles shows very tactical views, while the articles described larger factors. I found the unusual rules hard to digest at first, and it took a great deal of searching to find out how infantry combat factors worked (it's not listed in the descriptions of the counters, but in the unit "data sheets" at the end of the rules). Perhaps the most difficult rule to digest is the idea that you must roll on the loss modification table even if you miss, because it might get modified into a hit if the difference between the gun penetration factor and the defense's armor is great enough. But for all that, I think it was a good game. It can actually be played in an afternoon, and if one player understands the system well, it shouldn't be too difficult to teach. The simultanous movement system is simple enough to use easily, but still preserve the effects of surprise and reaction time. Although I have not yet pulled out Mech War 2, SPI's last and biggest tactical armor game, it appears to use many of the same systems that Panzer Battles did, making Panzer Battles an excellent training system for learning Mech War 2. --Robert Dushay