First Impressions - Paolo Mori’s Blitzkrieg! (board game)

The board at the end of the game of Blitzkrieg.

The second game that we played on our games night was Paolo Mori’s Blitzkrieg! This is a two player game which I played with the eldest (15) who has always been fascinated by the WW2 period. Blitzkrieg! sets itself the challenge of playing out the entire war in around 20 minutes, and delivers. We took a bit longer but had we known the rules it would have easily been achievable.

The game board represents five theatres of operation, each with two or three distinct campaigns. Each theatre has an overall track which shows who is winning that theatre overall. There’s also an overall war victory track which is adjusted based on events in each theatre of operation. In most cases, you have to work your way through each campaign within a theatre in sequence.

The game comes with two little screens with all the rules you need. You have a bag of military forces - these are air units (can be used on land and sea), armies (can be used on land only) and navies (can be used on sea only). Each unit has a numerical value. Some may be ‘blitz’ units, but more on that later. There are also generals and admirals which score based on numbers of other units of the same type (sea or land) you’ve deployed already.

There are also special units - better armies and navies, spies, scientists and even atomic weapons.

Within each theatre of operation, campaigns are marked by a series of spaces between two and five long. Spaces are coloured blue for water, brown for land and both for coastal. Each turn, by default, you will play one unit into an active campaign space in any theatre, and draw another unit from your bag to replenish your forces. You have three units in your reserve to select from at any time.

However, most campaign spaces have special effects; some let you draw and extra unit immediately, others allow you to randomly send one of your opponent’s units back to their bag by bombing them. You can also gain special units, or the ability to shift the war in an individual theatre by moving the position on  its track. Finally, you can increase your score on the overall war victory track through the use of propaganda.

Winning an individual campaign happens when someone fills the final space. At that point, the total forces deployed are summed and the victory points for that campaign added to the winner’s score on the war victory track. The theatre of operations’ track is not changed. You can win an entire theatre of operations if you can move its track to your end. As you progress on that track you also get victory points. If you do reach the end, you get all the benefits that remain on the theatre.

The game ends when a player reaches 25 victory points on the war victory track. As the Axis player always starts, if they reach 25 first then the Allied player gets a final turn. The player with the highest victory score always wins.

So overall, a simple game. Does it deliver? 

My answer to that is ‘yes’. There’s a surprising amount of nuance in the game. You find yourself holding back on completing campaigns because your opponent may be able to seize victory if there are two spaces left and you play the penultimate space. That’s when having a blitz unit is useful because it lets you immediately play a second unit. You can get drawn into the battle of the tracks in each theatre and get distracted from overall war victory track if you aren’t careful. You have difficult decisions - using the atomic bomb will definitely mean you likely win a specific campaign but the news of it negatively affects all the other theatres, stiffening the enemy’s resolve. I only won the game we played because I managed to get hold of a blitz unit that allowed me to complete the last Western European campaign track and get 5 victory points at the last minute, finishing a single point ahead of the eldest who had triggered the endgame by pushing through 25 victory points.

This will definitely come to the table again. At around thirty minutes including set up and tidy up, I think this will get a lot more play than the copy of Columbia Games’ Victory in Europe that I have.

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29 December 2022