On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Hoyt, Mike wrote: > But before I leap, I thought I'd ask the list's opinion of these games? > How does it play? Does it work better for infantry, or does it handle > armor well? Leadership seems to be important? Would you recommend any > particular title over another? Any you'd stay away from? I think it does OK for armor. I think "Panzerblitz updated by 25 years" is about what it is, except it is spread more thinly across theatres to produce more different games to sell.. The rules are now OK in general, although a couple of unclear passages remain, and a couple of others where you find yourself checking again and again, and a couple where you just think "why phrase it this way???" It's a fairly clean system, and the way leaders work is not uninteresting. It has interactive impulses, and since leaders can co-activate leaders of lower rank, by careful arrangement of your command structure you can often start out moving your forces in very few activations, but as units are scattered and leaders suppressed, that is lost and the efficiency of your force drops. How it plays... well, I have to admit after some time things just start feeling the same. I'd certainly play it rather than Panzerblitz, but I'd place it below Tank Leader. I played a number of scenarios from the first game with John Nebauer, and a number of scenarios of Afrika Korps with Chris Harding, and then the games just naturally slid onto the shelf and have not come back for now. Which ones to buy... generally try to get the first in a given theatre, as the later ones will have only about half the scenarios playable without the first. Although the humongous number of scenarios typically means that's not a problem for the big games; "half" is still a fair number. Doesn't necessarily hold for the small modules though. The series is clearly designed to wring a lot of games from the customer, for example it's now clear there will be at least three, if not four separate games covering North Africa. The first one only went into 1941 (even though the blurbs and I think even the back cover said differently), the second one is supposed to go till Gazala. The scenarios are, I think, the usual Avalanche quality, which means not checked for balance. Avalanche's argument is that this is because they're historical, but I don't buy that in general - I think it's just a convenient thing for them to say and most people will buy anyway. We have encountered the occasional very weird one (such as a scenario in the original game that made a great deal about the impenetrable armor of the sole KV tank platoon in there (and who knows the stories knows that's no joke in real world terms), yet in the scenario that platoon was inevitably killed within a few turns and the Germans always won. Someone didn't check their armor ratings I guess. But, as I said, there are a lot of scenarios in every game. I have recently received Semper Fi, and that might revive my interest enough to return to playing the series. Markus I agree with Markus's individual comments, but I think I come out with a more positive overall opinion. Probably what's making the difference for me is the existence of North Africa games in this series--I ignored the system for years until the first North Africa game came out, whereupon I bought it, and several (not all) of the others soon after. I have to check today, but I believe that I have the second NA game already on order. But I do also like the Bulge game, and I'm intrigued by the Guadalcanal game for a number of reasons including that real-world size of the battles was small enough that the game can hope to depict battles that "make it into the history books." (Whitman.) One as-yet-unmentioned aspect of these games is the huge variation in scenario length, from a handful of turns to over 100. I don't really mind "having" to buy several games to cover, e.g., the whole North Africa campaign. Other companies' games have been as limited in timespan as those in the Panzergrenadier series (e.g., original AH Tobruk covered only the Gazala battles and the attack on the eponymous fortress; with the possible exeption of scenario 1, PB covered only about a year's worth of the East Front), so the only difference is that with Panzergrenadier you can buy additional games to cover additional time, and with AH Tobruk, etc., you couldn't. And you don't have to buy the ones you don't want, because _almost_ everything in the Panzergrenadier series is stand-alone in that it's a game, not a module, even though some of the many scenarios may demand something from an earlier game. Brian