Review by: William Abner

There may be some slight confusion as to the title of this turn based World War II lite-strategy game from Ubisoft. Panzer General: Allied Assault should in no way be confused with the classic SSI game Panzer General, Panzer General: Allied General, or Panzer General 3D Assault. This game has literally nothing to do with the old PG games aside from the fact it’s a strategy game involving Sherman and Tiger tanks.

In fact, if you’re looking for a better comparison, Allied Assault is more like the 2008 Napoleonic boardgame Manoeuvre than it is any videogame. Each scenario is set on a small, square shaped grid with the Allies and the Germans set facing one another. Mission goals are simple such as conquering a set number of enemy home hexes (the back row), capturing specific hexes or wiping out the enemy units all together.

Each unit has stats just like any other game of this nature – set values for attacking soft and hard targets, defense values, entrenchment ratings, and so on. Additionally, each grid space has specific terrain which has a major impact on how a fight plays out—taking a city hex requires a bit more firepower than attacking open terrain, so on and so forth.

If all of this sounds like turn based wargaming 101, well, it is. The hook in Allied Assault is how card play is woven into the design. The game takes a popular boardgame mechanic and puts it to good use. In this case, you have a hand of cards that represent units (tanks, infantry, small artillery) and also various actions such as double time movement, etc. Air attacks such as strafing runs and saturation bombings are also in the deck but not represented by specific units on the board. The trick, though, is that each card also has a specific combat rating which can be used to turn the tide in battle and it forces you to decide when to use a card to place a unit on the board or its specific action and when to use it as a die roll modifier during a fight.

For example, when two units square off the game simply checks the attack, defense, terrain, and any support units to determine the overall attack and defense values for the two main combatants. Each player then is allowed to play any combat specific action cards and then go one step further by playing cards to modify their overall attack and defense values – then the attacker rolls a combat die, which is added, or subtracted as there are negative values on the die, to the attacker’s score and that overall attack value is compared to the defensive value of the defender. (If that sounds like it pays to be on the offensive, you’d be right.) Units have strength values so if you lose a fight the unit isn’t necessarily wiped out unless the attacker wins by a huge margin. It's a simple system that works perfectly in a game like this.

This will sound very familiar to veteran boardgamers and it forces you to make some terribly difficult decisions. Do you waste your powerful off-board artillery card during an important fight to give you a +5 combat die roll modifier? Will your opponent also play a high valued card or will he make you waste your off board artillery card? Sneaky card play is the order of the day, particularly when playing online.