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Europa is a series of board wargames planned to cover combat over the entire European Theater of World War II at a scale that represents units as divisions and game turns that represent two weeks of time. The series was launched in 1973, and is still in production as of 2005, with over a dozen titles published and several more still in production or planning. Most of the titles qualify as "monster games", a sub-genre of wargames featuring extensive orders of battle, complex rules, and usually large game maps with detailed representation of the terrain they cover.
Publishers and related publications
Games
The Europa series has been produced by four different publishers, as follows:- Game Designers Workshop (GDW), 1973-1987
- Game Research/Design (GRD), 1989-2000
- Mill Creek Ventures, 2001-2003
- Historical Military Services (HMS), 2004-present
GRD began publishing play aids for Europa under a license from GDW while GDW was still publishing the games. In 1989 they acquired use of the Europa trademark and began publishing the games, both new titles and "Deluxe Edition" revisions of previously published titles.
When GRD's Winston Hamilton died in 2000, Mill Creek Ventures bought his estate and took over production of Europa. They continued using the terms "Game Research/Design", "GRD", and "GRD Games" alongside "Mill Creek Ventures" in their publications. They never published an actual Europa game, but they continued with the development for future releases and released several issues of The Europa Magazine.
In mid-2004 HMS bought the assests that formerly belonged to GRD, and thus took over production of the Europa series. HMS published Wavell's War in November 2005 and has released two issues of The Europa Magazine.
Under the terms of the agreement whereby GRD had obtained use of the Europa trademark the intellectual property reverted to Rich Banner when Winston Hamilton died, so all Europa production by Mill Creek Ventures and Historical Military services has been done under a license from Banner.
The changes in publishers has interfered with continuity in terms of publication schedules — only one new title has appeared since 1998 — but there has been a great deal of continuity in terms of the people actually doing the development. For example, John Astell took over from Frank Chadwick as game designer for the series back when GDW was still publishing the series, designed or co-designed several of the titles released by GRD, and appears to still be involved in the titles now under development by HMS. Current HMS owners Gar Olmsted, Cory Manka, and Arthur Goodwin are also familiar names to long-time followers of the series, previously appearing in the credits of various games and/or as authors in the official magazine of the series and fanzine publications. Cory Manka has announced that he is negotiating with the other owners to withdraw from an ownership position.
GRD, Mill Creek, and HMS have also worked on newer game series covering the War in the Pacific (the Glory series) and World War I (the Great War series), which are somewhat similar to the Europa series, though not part of it.
Magazines and accessories
During 1976-1977 GDW published four issues of a flier called The Europa Newsletter. The fifth issue became a full-fledged magazine called The Grenadier, and expanded its coverage to GDW's other, non-Europa offerings as well.In 1988 GRD revived The Europa Newsletter. Issue #5 saw the title changed to The Europa News (TEN), a somewhat more substantial magazine with a stiff glossy cover. Starting with issue No. 11 the name was changed to simply Europa, and it has continued under that name since then. (As of December 2005, the most recent issue is #87, published in 2004. The repeated changes in publishers since 2000 have made the appearance of new issues somewhat erratic, but the magazine is still in existence.)
The Europa magazine sometimes refers to itself as The Europa Magazine (TEM), but it is just Europa on the cover and title page. Various subtitles have been in use over time as well, such as "The Europa Systems Magazine from GRD" (TESM) on the cover of #86 (with "HMS" substituted for "GRD" on the title page).
The magazine subscription is also a membership in The Europa Association, whose members also receive discounts on game orders and free copies of some of the "refit kit" materials. As with The Grenadier before it, The Europa Magazine has come to cover the publisher's other, non-Europa offerings, but unlike The Grenadier it has not strayed far afield, and still focuses primarily on Europa.
Over the life of the series a great number of official and unofficial play aids, rules variants, fanzines, and other Europa-oriented materials have been published. The most important of these was a fanzine called ETO: The New EuropaTM Newsletter, published by Bill Stone and running to 56 issues during 1985-1990. Starting with issue #45 in 1989 the subtitle was changed to The Independent EuropaTM Newsletter in response to GRD's acquisition of the trademark and publication rights for the system. This fanzine was an important focus for fans of the Europa system during the years when GDW was sidelining the system and it had not yet been turned over to GRD.
As of April 2005 HMS has an official Europa website at hmsgrd.com. The site has information about the availability of previously published games, the status of games now in production, plans for future games in the series, information about The Europa Association, downloadable errata sheets, and other material of interest to Europa players.
The East Front trilogy
The Europa series had its beginnings as a project by Paul Ricard ("Rich") Banner, Frank Chadwick, and Marc Miller to produce a series of three wargames to cover the entire Eastern Front of the Second World War at the scale of operations — that is, with more detail than a strategic simulation would provide but less than a tactical simulation would provide. The trilogy was to include:
- Drang nach Osten ("Rush to the East") - A game to cover Operation Barbarossa and the Soviet counterattacks over the winter of 1941-1942.
- Unentschieden ("Undecided") - An expansion kit to provide maps and orders of battle to allow play of Drang nach Osten to continue until the end of 1944 if neither side had achieved victory by then.
- Die Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods") - An expansion kit to provide maps and orders of battle to allow play of Drang nach Osten and Unentschieden to continue into Germany in 1945 if neither side had achieved victory by then.
Banner, Chadwick, and Miller founded Game Designers Workshop (GDW) to publish the trilogy. The game rules were a merger of Chadwick's earlier system for ground combat with Miller's earlier rules for science-fictional space combat adapted to represent WWII era air combat (both had published earlier titles reflecting those interests). Banner served as art director for the project.
GDW released Drang nach Osten and Unentschieden in 1973. Due to an expanding range of interests that the developers wanted to pursue with their successful new company, Die Götterdämmerung was postponed indefinitely and will now probably never be published as originally conceived, due to a greatly revised plan for the series. The scope of the expanded series is covered more thoroughly below.
Expansion from trilogy to Europa
The originally conceived trilogy began its expansion to cover the entire European theater when the developers started working on a game to cover Germany's unplanned 1941 Balkans Campaign to overthrow the governments of Yugoslavia and Greece, which delayed the onset of Operation Barbarossa by several weeks and partially contributed to its failure. The game was published in 1979 as Marita-Merkur, after German operations Marita and Merkur carried out during that campaign. However, it was published as a stand-alone game; by this time the Europa concept of covering the entire European Theater had evolved, and the plan called for publishing a series stand-alone games that provided Europa material, but concentrated on a single campaign and left most of the link-up issues to be addressed by future publications. The series also grew to cover topics such as the Spanish Civil War, which, though not strictly part of World War II, helped with the map coverage and provided a basis for what-if scenarios had World War II gone differently.
The plans for the series have evolved somewhat over the three decades of its existence, but can be appoximated as follows. The various games traditionally been identified as "Europa Game X", where X is a Roman numeral. Since some of the games have been published under different names for their various editions, the list given here describes the subject matter for each game and breaks out the individual titles as bullets. Many titles have unofficial but commonly used acronyms, given in parentheses after the title. Acronyms for the games' publishers are given as well.
Several of the games listed here have had separately published "refit kits" for corrections and minor upgrades, and in some cases those have been included in later printings of the games. Some games have also been reprinted with new box art. Such details are not shown here.
Europa I - The German invasion of the USSR and the Soviet riposte, 1941-1942.
- Drang nach Osten (DNO), GDW 1973.
- Fire in the East (FitE), GDW 1984.
- Unentschieden, GDW 1973.
- Scorched Earth, (SE) GDW 1987.
- Marita-Merkur, (MM) GDW 1979.
- Balkan Front, (BF) GRD 1990.
- Narvik, GDW 1974.
- Storm Over Scandinavia (SoS) GRD 1998.
- Their Finest Hour (TFH), GDW 1976.
- Western Desert, (WD) GDW 1982.
- War in the Desert (WitD), GRD 1995. (see below)
- Case White (CW), GDW 1977.
- First to Fight (FtF), GRD 1991.
- The Fall of France (FoF), GDW, 1981.
- The Near East (NE or TNE), GDW 1983.
- War in the Desert (WitD), GRD 1995. (see below)
- Spain and Portugal (S&P), GDW 1984.
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (FWtBT), GR/D 1995. (Covers the Spanish Civil War as well.)
- Torch, GDW 1985.
- War in the Desert (WitD), GRD 1995. (see below)
- Second Front (SF), GRD 1994.
- The Urals, GRD 1989.
- A Winter War (WW or AWW), GR/D 1992.
Material included in Balkan Front and First to Fight, published in 1990 and 1991 respectively, agreed with the above (excepting titles not yet released), and proposed the following extensions to wrap of the series, though none of them have been published:
Europa XV - The naval campaigns in the Mediterranean Sea and around the shores of Europe, 1939-1945.
- The Naval War
- Grand Europa
- Peace in our Time
However, material included with War in the Desert, published in 1995, introduced substantial changes to the plan. It included all the material previously distributed over Europa VI/IX/XI in a single publication, now officially Europa VI but billed as "Europa VI/IX/XI" on the game box. It also offered the following changes to the earlier numbering scheme, though none of the proposed new material has been published:
Europa V (a combination of the earlier V & VIII)
- Blitzkrieg in the West
- Partisan War
- Peace in our Time
- The Naval War
- Grand Europa
Material included with Storm Over Scandinavia, published in 1998, retained the same scheme, but proposed some new titles:
- Total War would be a third edition of Europa I.
- Total Victory would be a third edition of Europa II, and would apparently also cover material originally planned for the unpublished Die Götterdämmerung.
- The proposed but unpublished Blitzkrieg in the West would be retitled Lightning War.
Much of this planning apparently became moot when GR/D's assets were picked up by Mill Creek Ventures in 2001. Work on an Europa-style game covering the campaign in East Africa had already been underway by a group calling itself "The East Africa Map Company", and it now became an official Europa project to be published as Wavell's War, covering all of World War II not only in East Africa, but in North Africa and the Mediterranean as well. It was offered for preorder in 2002, and was published in November 2005. No Europa series number has been announced for it. Mill Creek Ventures also began development of Total War, the third edition of Europa I, and has offered it for preorder since 2003. Though development of the series continues, no formal plan for its completion has been announced since the one given in Storm Over Scandinavia in 1998.
Current status
The current status of the series can be seen at the publisher's Europa site, hmsgrd.com. As of November 2005 the plan for Europa conforms approximately to the plan offered in 1998 (above), except that no Roman numerals are given for the games, and:
- Partisan War has been renamed to PARTIZAN!
- Wavell's War joins the list.
- The Eastern Front is once more planned as a trilogy, with Clash of Titans inserted between Total War and Total Victory, to cover the years 1943-1944.
- A new Ike's War is proposed as a module linking War in the Desert with Second Front.
- There is no mention of Peace in our Time, The Naval War, or "Grand Europa"
The changes to the 1998 plan indicate an assessment by the new publishers that the Europa system cannot be completed simply by publishing the three discarded titles. Instead they propose Wavell's War and Ike's War as intermediate steps toward a completed system.
There is also a freely downloadable "Boot Camp Rules" set, with simplified rules to help people get started with the complex Europa system.
Notes
In 1988, Scorched Earth won the Origins Award for Best Boardgame Covering the Period 1900-1946 of 1987.
References
- HMS's official home page for the Europa series. Retrieved December 7, 2005.
- Miller, Marc (2001). "Europa Series Background". A collector's guide to the Europa material published by GDW. Retrieved April 20, 2005.
"Europa (wargame)"