Game of the Week, Jul 22 to 28

Hi everyone,

It’s Game of the Week time!

This week’s Game of the Week is Panzer Campaigns – Tunisia ‘43.

Panzer Campaigns – Tunisia ‘43 is latest 4.04 version, released a few weeks ago, and our product description encapsulates this campaign well:

Toward the end of 1942, the German High Command saw that the tide was turning in the war. On the East Front, von Paulus was surrounded in Stalingrad. Rommel had been defeated at El Alamein in Egypt and, in October, was retreating with his battered army toward Tripoli. Now the Americans were making their presence felt by landing at various points in Morocco and Algeria, threatening the Axis position in Africa from the rear. The Germans rushed forces by air and sea to Tunisia to counter the threat. They arrived just in time, as the lead elements of the allied forces made their drive to capture Tunis by Christmas 1942. Then the tide turned with the weather, the roads turned to mud tracks and the Allied drive was stalled. Wedged between the on-coming Allied Armies of Algeria and Egypt, a scratch force of powerful German’s panzers, intermixed with available infantry replacement forces, regained the initiative through February, inflicting serious losses on green US forces facing battle against a determined enemy for the first time. But this was only to delay the inevitable loss of the Axis presence in Africa.

There are 34 Scenarios included. Below is a list of the major engagements included many with multiple scenarios:

• The Race to Tunis - November 25 - December 9, 1942
• The Germans Kasserine Offensive - February 14-21, 1943
• The End in Africa – April 22 - May 6, 1943

The master map (154,548 hexes) stretches from Tebessa on the western side of the West Dorsal mountains, to the Mareth Line in the south-east.

Panzer Campaigns – Tunisia ‘43 includes the aforementioned playable scenarios, and campaigns, as well as a Getting Started scenario to introduce new players to the game system. The included scenarios are a good mix of small (division), medium (corps) and large (army) engagements.

Of the four included Order of Battles, the largest includes over 2,100 units from the German, Luftwaffe, Italian, Vichy French, Free French, British, Commonwealth and American forces that participated in the campaign.

We included a lot of historical documentation and notes with this title, you can review each by clicking on the links below.

Getting Started Guide

Designer Notes

Planning Map

There has been a range of books covering the Tunisian battles. Following are some representative books for anyone that would like some more background on the campaign. You can click on the book images below to be taken to the Publisher or Amazon, if applicable.

Informational

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (The Liberation Trilogy, Vol. 1). This the first volume of a trilogy covering the liberation of Europe in World War II.

The Bloody Road to Tunis: Destruction of the Axis Forces in North Africa, November 1942-May 1943. Covering the Tunisian campaign in entirety the author makes good use of personal accounts and other eyewitness testimony to make the text feel very contemporary.

The Battle of the Peaks and Long Stop Hill: Tunisia, April-May 1943. An interesting work covering the British 78^th Divisions actions on the road to Tunis. Replete with small unit actions, this gives a solid coverage of the actual fighting.

Defeat at Kasserine: American Armor Doctrine, Training, and Battle Command in Northwest Africa, World War II. A very good analysis of what went wrong for the US forces at their first major battle at Kasserine Pass.

Meeting the Fox: The Allied Invasion of Africa, from Operation Torch to Kasserine Pass to Victory in Tunisia. Another very solid history including Operation Torch through to the fall of Tunisia.

This Salted Soil: The Battle for Tunisia, 1942-1943. This book is a little different. Recently released (2023), it is a novel built around the battle for Tunisia using both historical and fictional characters. As one of the reviewers said: And This Salted Soil reads as history. The fictional characters are mostly either war correspondents or civilians who serve to humanize the story and to flavor it with elements of Tunisian culture. It works. What could have been a dry “dates and events” narrative of the campaign in North Africa is vividly colored and fleshed out by a light touch of fiction that invites the reader, at least this one, to share in the stakes, not only with the fictional characters, but also with history itself.

Now for video content:

The Mack has a whole series of YouTube videos that you can see listed here. 

War Stories has a great background video.

 

Following are some in-game screen shots of what to expect. Each image can be clicked for a full-sized view.

As mentioned, the build we are making available today is a new 4.04 version that was released last month. A range of new features are included, and you can read the Changelog here. All new purchases will be this latest version.

If you already own Panzer Campaigns – Tunisia ‘43, please note that you will have a new installer available in your store account. There will not be an update available for existing installations.

Beginning with the recent Squad Battles updates, then Panzer Battles then Musket & Pike updates, Civil War Battles and now on to Panzer Campaigns - we have been requiring a complete clean install of your games to get the new version. There's a variety of reasons for this - core changes to file formats (moving to PNG files in some cases), new infrastructure for future A/I enhancements, Windows 11 compatibility changes and the enormous size many of the updates have grown to be. Regarding that last point, many of the updates were retaining backwards compatibility with ancient installers, in some cases back to the HPS days! This required inclusion of a huge number of files, and in some cases an additional Batch file to reorganize everything into the new file structures. It was getting problematic on several points, not the least of which was some security software packages were blocking the batch files from running.

So, these fresh installs will resolve all of those problems in one fell swoop. You uninstall your existing copy of the game using the built in Windows "App Management" feature in the Control Panel. You then do a clean install of the game, and everything is in its proper place. 

We will be doing this for every game series we publish, in time - if all goes well during the course of 2024. Once the new "base line" is established we will begin to offer incremental updates again on the site. These will only include files changed since that new baseline for that series. With that said, you can ALWAYS do a clean install at any time, and the installer linked in your Store Account is the most recent version.

So, again, how do you get these new versions? 

You must go and login to your Store Account to download new full installers. 

Notes regarding Store Accounts.

1. If you go to login using one of the above links and it tells you "no account found" - don't worry! - just send us an email at the Help Desk and we will locate your records. It's just a matter of completing the account setup process.
2. When you login you will see all your orders listed there. Under each order number is the word (Downloads). If you click that it will take you to a page where you can do a new download of the game and it will also display your serial number. Again, each of the installers is fully up-to date with the latest patches already included.

If you don’t already own this title, what are you waiting for? You can buy it directly from the dedicated product page.

We hope you enjoy this week’s, Game of the Week. We thought it was important to showcase this title on the upcoming 110^th anniversary of the start of the first truly world war.  Like all WDS titles, there is a lot of game play included at a very attractive price.