Most, if not all, Grognards are familiar with the strange and terrible saga of the Europa gaming system. For those of you who are not, here’s a summary of events up to 2013, as well as a trenchant series of exchanges about more recent developments.  Their signature East Front game, Total War, has been in a strange legal-sloth-hand-of-fate purgatory for years. The website is virtually dormant, indicating no news is bad news.

Fortunately, there is some hope. A group of Europa Diehards have continued to play and discuss the game, with one intrepid soul actually publishing a new game.

Timothy Davis’ effort covers the hypothetical German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 using rules published by John Astell. Astell was a major figure in the early days of the Europa system, and, apparently retained publishing rights. This rule set is “Blitzkrieg Unending.” Tim’s company is New Europa Games and Variants.

I contacted Tim through the company’s website last month. He was working his way through some printing/publishing problems with the Europa variant counters. However, he still found the time to ship me a copy of Fall Grun.

I like it!

It does have the feel of a Beta. The rules have some gaps, the charts are nothing extraordinary and the map is printed on less expensive vinyl. But it’s a quality job and very similar to Europa. So why in the hell couldn’t the HMS/GRD folks do this? Tim’s published a quality product – especially for experienced Europa players who can fill in the gaps – and offers it for a relatively low price. OK, the question is rhetorical since it’s well known that there are all kinds of legal/creditor/investor issues hobbling HMS/GRD…..but just get the bloody game out.

Back to Fall Grun. The counter symbols are slightly smaller than Europa, but the maps have the same feel with different colors for terrain and symbols for terrain features such as woods. Europa players would find most of the charts easy to work with. If one doesn’t like the vinyl map, use maps from the other games or contact Timothy about the availability of the more expensive paper maps. Yes, paper is more expensive than vinyl….Go Figure.

Timothy deserves kudos for his efforts!  His variant counters also look pretty damn good.

I hope my wargaming accomplice Tim and I get this on the table soon. Dunno, since there is talk about playing the East Africa scenario from Wavells War next.

Here are pictures of the game’s components. These were not taken with my IPhone!