So my current copy of Panzer is a boardgame 2 ed by GMT games. I absolutely love this game. It is a detailed or simple as you want to play with a very flexible add what you want rules system. However, I don’t like the little hexes on the maps for stacking lots of counters. And the vehicle counters don’t fit the way I would like them to. So to that end, I’m moving away from counters and hexes to tables and tape measures. I have started a small collection of 20 mm gaming miniatures and will be trying some 15 mm to find a scale that I enjoy. 20 mm works just fine on a larger table. Since most of my gaming is done on the kitchen table which is not very big, I’ll be giving the 15 mm scale a try to see if that allows for larger battles, in terms of number of tanks.
I have tweaked the rules a bit for this to work the way I want. This is actually quite easy since the rules are very modular. For instance, at the 20 mm scale, I multiply all values by 3. So for instance, the Russian t-34 with base off-road speed of 5 moves up to 15″ with one move order. Firing is the same, measure from base to base of target and then multiply the attach columns on the data cards by 3 to find your range category. This puts the extreme range of the Tiger tank at about 63″. This is actually in line with several 20 mm based games I have seen.
Whats very cool, is that you can still play the rules mostly the same. You place orders based on what your vehicles can see. However, I have tweaked initiative which does have impact on the way orders should be issued. For, example, there is a token for each unit per side put into a cup or such for a random chit pull to which side goes first. So it’s possible to have one side go several times in a row compared to their opponent. If there are three German units and three Russian units, 6 total chits are drawn from. If a German chit is pulled, the German player activates one unit. This leaves two German and three Russian chits left giving the Russian player a higher chance of going next. This means that there is a chance that a fire order is wasted if the intended target at the time of applying the fire order moves or is destroyed. You could fire at another target that moves into range however, so not entirely wasted. The trick is, how to address overwatch. The difference is, overwatch is used to interrupt an enemy move while it happens, but you cannot interrupt with a fire order. Overwatch units get to act during the opponent activation or immediately fire in response to enemy fire. So this allows all the orders to be used with an initiative system I prefer. I’ll film out a sample video of my thoughts on this way to play Panzer.
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