Revisiting a Tale of Two Tank Platoons

I have just re-bought back into the 'Panzer' series, which looks at WWII tactical action. 

In September 2018, I put up a post called A Tale of Two Tank Platoons. In introducing the game play, it looked at an action from the perspective of how tank crews from both sides on the east front were trained.

I think the post has been one of my favourites during my time as a blogger and so rather than write up something similar, I thought I would simply give a link back to that article - I hope you enjoy it. 

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2018/09/panzer-and-tale-of-two-tank-platoons.html

RESOURCES

I also have some separate webspace called COMMANDERS, which is more snippet based than here. I post there more often than here and at the moment it is a more reliable way of seeing my stuff than Blogger.

LINK 

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html

Panzer, a re-introduction!

Originally published by Yaquinto Games in 1979, Panzer, designed by James Day, was refined and republished in 2012 for publication with GMT. It has recently had its third printing.

The game is a WWII design with armour as its focus. Each counter represents a single vehicle, a gun or a section of infantry. The map scale is 100 metres per hex, which gives an interesting contrast to many of the WWII tactical games that use the same unit scale, but operate at just 50 metres per hex.

Anyway, Panzer and associated modules were one of the four big WWII tactical designs that I previously collected, but sold two years ago and here we are again, going full circle, it has re-entered the collection and I am enthusiastically putting it through its paces again - starting with scenario 1 from the base game and slowly picking up and enjoying the depth of play that falls from this tank centric design.

The rest of this post just highlights some of the facets of this design and uses an AAR of scenario 1 to demonstrate some of the flavour and mechanics. Please use the ‘read more’ tab for the rest of this page.

Panzer - and a tale of two tank platoons

Panzer is a detailed WWII tactical game published by GMT, hexes represent 100 metres of ground and counters represent individual tanks.

This post takes a slice of action to create a fictional insight into the experiences of two quite different tank platoons, one German, the other Soviet, that find themselves fighting for the same objective on a battlefield in late 1943.

The differences between the men’s training and their machines will hopefully come through as this system delights in such things and some aspects of the system will also get to be discussed.

please use the ‘read more’ tab for the rest of this post.

Panzer by GMT

The Panzer series is designed by James Day and now produced by GMT.

After dabbling over the past year with two other tactical WWII systems, I have picked up my Panzer system again and set about reading the rules to refresh my memory, while enjoying the detail and some of the sensible decisions falling from the design.

Just to get the rule flow going again in my head, I have returned to the introductory scenario 1, ‘The Crossings : Ukraine late 1943’.

The rest of this post gives way to some general observations and ramblings of a system that remains superbly supported by its designer and that oozes designer knowledge and passion (I must also give mention to system fan Fernando Sola, who also gives unstinting supporting in fielding Q&A at both Consimworld and BoardGameGeek).

Please use the ‘read more’ tab for the rest of this post

Panzer by GMT - analysis of T34 v Tiger I

Panzer published by GMT and designed by James Day

As part of an ongoing series of articles that looks how individual tactical games deal with gun / armour rules, this post offers some observations about the game 'Panzer' published by GMT.

As usual, the article will be comparing how a design handles T34/76 tanks running up against a  German Tiger I, while giving some insight to design / play processes.

Above graph showing gun fire values at point blank range.

Panzer is a tank centric game that interestingly takes a more ‘hard data’ approach to processes than we are generally used to seeing in these days of abstraction based tactical games. Does this bring us closer in terms of simulation?

Please use the ‘read more’ tab for the rest of this post.