The World War II Game

As I have mentioned before on this blog, when I was in high school and college I designed a world war II game that my friends and I actually played. We played it several times with a new iteration of the design after each play and near the end we had at least the European Theater in very good shape if I do say so myself. We also played many commercial wargames on World War II battles and campaigns and part of the purpose of this blog is to recall and revive that experience and perhaps to design another iteration – one that would take advantage of fresh research on a wider variety of more accessible and higher quality sources. It also might take advantage of computer capability e.g. by using some of the concepts and techniques of the Civilization series of computer games.

For those of you who don’t want to wait for that I want to mention some commercial non-computer games that would allow you to play out some of the campaigns I have mentioned so far. The Wargamer magazine #37 had a game called “China Incident” that covered the fighting between China and Japan from 1937 to 1941. Strategy & Tactics magazine # 152 had a game on a hypothetical German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Suffice it to say that the victory conditions turned on when as opposed to whether Germany could defeat Czechoslovakia. S&T # 158 had a game on Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol. The game rules note that Conflict magazine also had a game on the July battles published in 1973. The S&T game (published in 1993) seems to me to be the more comprehensive and higher quality product. Finally the Europa Series on WW II had a game on Poland called “Case White” and there was a second edition called “First to Fight”.

Although these games are long since out of print, I suspect they turn up for sale on the internet from time to time. If anyone knows of other commercially produced games on these campaigns, please let people know about them in the comments section.