For those of you who read my stuff, you know I'm a big fan of Phillipe Thibaut's computer wargame designs. With his new SGS design studio via Avalon Digital, last July he dropped Winter War on the Russo-Finnish War of 1939, and now follows this success with Afrika Korps, another game with a distinctly Wars Across the World-on-steroids pedigree.
It is truly the best example of how games can accurately simulate high-level military operations using a common set of core rules across multiple timeframes and environments, with only a minimal amount of tweaking. It means that if you learn one game, you can easily play the rest - and so it is with Winter War and Afrika Korps.
Which is another way of saying that I am not going to discuss detailed game play mechanisms - like turn sequence and the like - because I've been there, done that. Instead what follows is a discussion on what changed, what hasn't and whether the game lives up to the history it replicates.