Listen up, tankers! We’ve been looking at the intelligence picture very closely over the last few days, and it’s time to give you a more in-depth brief on the situation. There’s a new game in town, and it’s tailor-made for you armoured types – Achtung Panzer!, as the Germans would say! Take out your tank recognition cards, and hold any questions until the end, please – we’ve got a lot to get through!
We’ll start with the basics – it’s always good to remember what we’re fighting for, and why. Now, if you’ve been following the daily Intelligence Reports, you’ll know some of this, but it’s worth paying attention anyway.
Achtung Panzer! is our brand-new game of in-depth 28mm WW2 tank combat that lets you fight exciting close-quarter battles in dense terrain, and experience the effectiveness of armoured fighting vehicles and their crews in WW2, with enormous customisability and a rewarding campaign system. Utilising our extensive range of WW2 armoured vehicles and your existing Bolt Action vehicle collections, you can recreate some of the greatest tank battles of the war and scenes from classic films such as Kelly’s Heroes and Fury, (who doesn’t like a good Hollywood tank fight?) with detailed and unique statistics ensuring the tanks on the tabletop feel like their real-life counterparts!
You’ll control a small number of tanks, and using a unique initiative order system do battle through heavy terrain on the tabletop. Detailed spotting and destruction mechanics will require you to first identify your targets, then line up the perfect shot before you fire. The action and event card system ensures that no two games are the same, and the linked campaign system allows you to see your crews and tanks progress over the course of numerous battles.
Many of you have served previous tours on the Bolt Action and Tank War battlefields, and you’ll no doubt be wondering whether you can put that experience to use here. Now hear this: this is a war unlike any you’ve fought before! Bolt Action is a game of hard-fought infantry actions with limited armoured support, and the Tank War supplement takes the framework of Bolt Action and adapts it to tank-on-tank fighting while maintaining the quick simplicity of the parent game. Achtung Panzer! is entirely its own beast, diving deep into the nuts and bolts of Second World War armoured combat to provide a far more in-depth gaming experience, putting you in the commander’s seat (with the best view in the house)! With a particular focus on the abilities of your crews and the performance of individual tanks, guns, and shells, it’s all about the tanks and tankers here – so leave that footslogger know-how at the door! Bolt Action and Tank War aren’t going anywhere, but this new warfront is sure to see the best armoured commanders deployed – that’s where you come in.
Well there you go – what’s that? You want more information? Well, I suppose since you’re going to be the ones out there in the thick of the action, we can reveal some more highly classified details – just make sure you remember all of this when the shells start flying!
So how does it all work? Well, there are plenty of concepts that seasoned wargamers will be familiar with – dice rolls are made with D6, measurements are in inches, and you need line-of-sight to a target in order to shoot it – so don’t worry about having to invest in a load of funky new dice or strange templates! There are, however, a number of cards and tokens involved!
Each tank has its own card – think of this like a ‘control panel’ and you won’t go far wrong. On it you’ll find all of the vital statistics needed to play, and spaces for the various tokens denoting things like ammunition, crew skill level, and the like – this allows you to see at a glance the status of all the vehicles in your platoon, giving you all the information you need to make vital tactical decisions!
Now, I know you’re all raring to get in the fight, but hold your horses just a moment – we need steely nerves and cool heads in this kind of war, and you need as much preparation as we can give you – that’s why there’ll be in-depth breakdowns of the different phases of the game delivered as briefings just like this one during the pre-order period. That way, when the big day comes, you’ll be as ready as possible for the fighting to come! It’d be pointless, however, to give you those briefings without a basic grounding in the core mechanics – take a copy of this handout, study it carefully, and report back here soon for a briefing on moving carefully, as a unit, through dense terrain in enemy territory.
Tankers… dismissed! …for now…
Pre-Order Achtung Panzer! from 16-02-2024!
35 comments
Will it be possible to download the game rules before purchasing to familiarize yourself with the game system? This will help people understand the mechanics and draw conclusions for themselves.
There’s a typo on the first British card shown up above. Peniontration > Penetration.
Looks interesting, still a bit on the fence on the gotcha cards and 40k like strategems but will see how it goes.
One question though, what’s Penionetration? haha
The artillery strike card says it.
Good catch – we used the pre-production card images for this article as we were so keen to show them off – this one should have been replaced with the finished, spellchecked example!
We’ll get it updated to the correct one (which reads ‘penetration’) ASAP!
Penionetration is a perfectly cromulent word.
Your kind understanding embiggens our spirits!
Hi,
Will it be necessary to purchase models to access some of the cards?
Cheers, Ade
+1
also interested in this question
+1
Hi Ade,
The rulebook and card packs for each nation will be available separately starting from Friday!
Is there any possibility of a cooperative or solo mode of play?
+1
With so many tanks that fought in WW2…will the game include cards for all of them? Customizable templates, maybe?
Will you have the rules and some common vehicle cards (sherman and pz4 and T-34) available so we can decide if this game works for us before investing in it? IE: BA is fine, but Tank War did not work well for our club.
Will the necessary rules and card packs be available outside of buying new models?
I am concerned about the 40k style of randomization. I know the basis for the BA mechanics is from 40K already.
Hey Jason, Eric Holmes here … I’ve used Tank Wars just to build a Bolt Action force without the extraneous Player Character rules. Seemed to work fine for a “small action” with scenario based house rules. YMMV, and as always, Roll Sixes!
For the love of all that’s armored, please include printable blank tank cards so we can add tanks Warlord doesn’t make.
I saw a load of the new tank crews previewed at the open day, what material will they be made of?
Will the rules focus on any particular period of the war, i.e. mid to late, or will they cover all of WW II?
Will the game work in 15mm too ?
’cause that feels like a proper scale for a tank focussed game …
Another manufacturer does make a 15mm tank game but it appears to be a lot different. That one’s more like X-Wing with tanks, where this one looks a lot more like 40k 2nd Edition tanks.
While it’s designed for 28mm, basically all wargames are ‘scale agnostic’ at their core!
We’ve messed around with some of the smaller tanks from our sister company Skytrex in playtesting, and just by converting all measurements from inches to cm, the game worked just fine!
Bought the cards, rules and tokens set.
Our group is going to try this at 15mm with no mods to measurements…
Will the game be translated into French?
Before I make the plunge I need to know all the model kits you list with Bolt Action, if cards will be separately available for those tanks. I want to play late war with Soviet and German tanks, but I don’t want to have to print out or cobble together cards for those tanks. Thank you.
Hi Byron,
The rulebook and card packs for each nation will be available separately starting from Friday!
No what he’s saying is are you going to add more tanks like the King Tiger for example, the BA-10 armored car, the Puma, and other vehicles.
Now that we can see the pre-order, it seems strange that there isn’t an option with just the book and cards. For someone like me who already has literally 50 Warlord tank models in various stages of construction, getting another five tanks as the base starter seems like overkill.
I would absolutely buy the book and templates and probably every possible deck of faction cards: but I’m not feeling like dropping so much money to get another three Shermans and two Panthers when I already have four Shermans and three Panthers on my shelf.
Are there plans for a release without the plastic?
I have the same question. I have quite a few tanks and would interested in rules & the cards.
Hi Berto!
The rulebook and card packs for each nation will be available separately starting from Friday!
COOL! Let the tanking begin!
Each nation?
Theres seems be 2 missing there.
I also have the same question, re can I just purchase the rules and cards?
I am really interested in the early Desert War 1940/1941, will cards be produced to cover the tanks employed in this period by the British and the Italians?
If I have three tanks of the same type in my force, how many ‘control panel’ cards do I need?
Do three Easy Eight tanks need three Easy Eight cards?
If so, how will we get those duplicate cards in future?
Will future tank kits come with AP cards, like they have BA cards and dice?
It seems like each tank needs its own “dashboard” so 3 of the same tank would need its own card.
I think the rule book will have pages of cards you can photcopy or scan, and I guess you could always scan and print the original one.
Hopefully theres a companion app in the pipeline.