At last! The crown jewel in my game collection has arrived.
When I was a kid, SPI’s monster game War in Europe was one of my favorite games. We actually played the full campaign game all the way through – my best friend Tom dismantled his model train set in his basement so we’d have a table large enough to fit the maps. It depicts World War II on a regimental/division level (the game comes with 3600 counters), with a 20-mile hex map of Europe that takes nine 22″ x 36″ maps to show the whole thing. Turns represent a week.
It truly is a monster game.
I got rid of mine some years ago, when I was moving a lot, and decided I wasn’t ever going to play these sorts of games again. Like most of my collection lost in that ill-considered decision, I’ve been slowly rebuilding, and now I finally have the Big One. I got it on eBay for a surprisingly reasonable price (less than the reissue from Victory Games will cost when it’s back in print) plus over a dozen erratas, expansions, and so forth. It’s even partially unpunched!
The box has a dinged corner, but other than that it looks to be in great shape. I can’t wait to play one of the smaller scenarios (the big campaign game will have to wait until I’m able to reclaim the spare bedroom from its status as junk room). Here are some pics of my copy:
And here’s a stock photo of what the whole thing looks like with all the maps put together (with a full-sized newspaper for scale):
My go to WWII Europe game was always Third Reich; sadly I seem to have lost the resource card for France in a move almost 20 years ago.
My go to monster WWII game was World in Flames, but my father and I would have to take a joint two-week vacation in order to play. I wonder how War in Europe compares. I think we once used the War in Europe map for a WWI variant of it that SPI put out.