Review by: Robert Zacny

After the debacle at Stalingrad and an aggressive pursuit by the Red Army, German high command attempted to salvage the situation on the southern flank by launching a desperate counterattack against overextended Soviet armies. The ensuing Third Battle of Kharkov, the subject of Achtung Panzer: Kharkov 1943, was a bitter struggle between two exhausted combatants, using whatever was left to salvage whatever they could.

Achtung Panzer makes you responsible for a small sector of the battle, one of the battalion-level officers who executed their commanders' bold maneuvers using dated equipment and managing fronts that would have stretched entire regiments. You always have much less than you need, and attrition swiftly whittles that down. It's a recipe for tense, demanding wargaming.

You begin each turn on the operation map, a chessboard where single platoons occupy each square, and some squares possess victory markers of varying value. The broad strokes of the operation occur here, in four-hour increments, using a simultaneous turn system. When opposing platoons clash over a square, combat is resolved through a tactical battle.

You deploy your forces, squad by squad, on a handsome 3D battlefield before the action starts. Platoons directly involved in the clash appear on the battlefield, as do those in adjacent squares on the operations map. Every engagement, then, acts like a vortex. A skirmish between a recon platoon and a rifle platoon can draw in several more units until the most important battle of the operation is being fought entirely by accident over the wrong patch of frozen turf.