Today I upped my game to run “The Village, Part 2”, a scenario that introduced me to the Advanced Rules of that favourite tabletop wargame of mine – Panzer!

The Advanced Rules add more detail to the tank direct fire – one of the best things about the game – and allow you to pretty easily model the impact of AP rounds against different areas of the target vehicle. This was always the mechanism that I loved the most!

Additional rules are added to allow Infantry and Towed Guns to be added to scenarios. The Advanced Rules also add Indirect Fire – such as off-board artillery – and a more robust Command system that forces commanders to group assets to maximise their utility. There are also rules for lots of edge cases, such as close assaults and overrun attacks by vehicles.

What I love is that the rules are written in a modular style that allowed me to skip over stuff that wasn’t relevant to the scenario. I added in a few of the edge case situations as they arose simply by pausing to the read the rules and then apply them. This is an approach that wargamers never seemed to be bothered by… and which I think roleplayers should learn to accept during the learning phase of any new system.

The Soviets won this time. The advanced armour penetration rules meant that they could shift around behind the Panthers and take shots capable of knocking them out. The SU-100 and SU-85s in the scenario also came into their own because they could take longer-ranged shots and knock out tanks they were flanking.

All in all, I had a good fun afternoon and learned most of the rules of the game. That’s not bad for two sessions with a game that is rated as 6/10 for complexity.

Game on!