PanzerBlitz

Tabletop Board Wargame

An intense interest in history and a love of games in general combined to produce my enthusiasm for wargames starting at an early age. As I recall, a lot of the games from my youth included a statement such as "for ages 12 and up" and that is about the age I was when I managed to acquire my first board wargame. It was titled Waterloo and featured a blue monochrome image of Napoleon on horseback which seems cribbed from a painting by Ernest Meissonier. I no longer have that game, but I have purchased many other map and cardboard chit wargames in the years following.

The game PanzerBlitz was published by the Avalon Hill Game Company in 1970 as one of their new Bookcase Games. It was widely available in department and toy stores and hobby shops and it ranks today as one of the best selling wargames of all time. Finding a second hand copy is therefore not a difficult task. 

I came to PanzerBlitz (PB) rather later than many, years after its release in fact. My first recollection of playing PB is at a high-school friend's house in the late 1970s. As I recall now, I thought it compared poorly to the wargames we had been playing with miniature tanks. (Today, I would say I was missing the point of PB back then.) 

It would be another decade plus before I purchased a copy of PB for my collection and I started to really look at the game in a serious way. Designed by James F. Dunnigan (publisher of Strategy & Tactics Magazine and founder of SPI) to be a tactical game on the platoon and company level, PB is not meant to feel like "tank on tank" as many wargames using miniatures do. 

As the years have progressed and I have revisited PB numerous times, the game has taken on some additional charm for me. Nostalgia doubtlessly plays its part in my appreciation of PB, but the game design itself seems much more sophisticated today than I originally thought. Although it includes a combat results table (odds based CRT) and units can be eliminated during play, PanzerBlitz is primarily a game of maneuver. It also includes a level of abstraction that probably annoyed the teenage me, but which plays well with me at my present age.

PanzerBlitz was an innovative design for its day and introduced the hobby to a number of concepts we see in many later games. The tank silhouettes used on the playing pieces is I believe the first time I saw that done. The game includes three geomorphic map boards that may be arranged in a variety of ways to produce a number of different battlefield maps. The game is setup and played using the map boards and unit pieces according to a situation card. There are twelve situations included in the game and many additional ones have been published in various sources including General Magazine (published by AH). Replay potential is practically endless as one varies the pieces used, the victory conditions and various map configurations.

PanzerBlitz is quick to learn and quick to play. Many of the situation cards have one side (German or Russian) attacking a basically static defender making the game friendly to solitaire as well as one-on-one play. The situations include a variety of missions, and today I see the game as having value as a tool for learning mobile war(game) tactics. Attacking a prepared position, conducting a delaying or blocking defense, and planning and executing a raid behind enemy lines are among the several challenges that the various situation cards present. Each situation is unique, has levels of victory, and encourages trying different strategies through multiple play-throughs.

The game includes a campaign guide featuring vehicle data and silhouettes (as a teenager I loved this feature and memorized much of the data), unit organizations and designer notes and when combined with the variety of game pieces suggests many design it yourself possibilities to expand play. Although I have enjoyed many board wargames bearing the descriptor, "tactical", I find PB remains a particular favorite with its own niche. While other games offer more detailed combat crunch or chrome (hit location, gun penetration values, etc.) none that I have encountered quite equal PB for its mission based approach. The scope of PB allows me to see the situation from a tactical mission perspective, to picture and plan my methods with an eye toward achieving victory (in game terms!), and to accomplish the given mission (or perhaps to learn why mine was a "bad" plan) better than any other game I have found to date.