JagdPanther Magazine #7

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Take yet another journey with us back to 1974, when a small wargame club in Amarillo, Texas (led by Steve Cole) produced an award-winning magazine filled with articles, variants, and reviews. Production values had not improved (layout was done by hand with glue sticks on cardboard; some of the typewriter produced pages printed better than others), and we still printed on that insane 14" paper. (The pages are divided in half for this PDF version.) Cover art by James McNease who drew it from a photo.

This issue included the complete game Gorlice-Tarnow 1915, based on the continent-wide campaign on the Russian front in that year. This was designed by a local gamer (Mike Harris) who was a World War I aficionado. As before, the counters were on paper; the gamers had to mount them by themselves. The map came on five sheets of paper and had to be pieced together by the players without much in the way of directions.

This issue includes several features:

• The usual editorials, news, and some flamewar stuff.
• An expansion of the GDW game Chaco by Marc Miller, the original designer.
• A snarky review of an alternative history book that somehow replaced all of the German losses in WW2 out of thin air.
• Variants for the GDW Romans-vs-Germans game Eagles.
• A historical evaluation of the WW2 bombing campaign.
• A discussion of the constant unofficial revisions of big company wargames that were poorly designed and did not work, calling on the publishers to pick the best of the unofficial revisions and make it the official one.
• Various evaluations of ways to warp the rules of recent games by other publishers.
• General ideas for applied command-and-control rules to any wargame, reflecting bad communications and units that never get the orders to move or attack.
• Alternate rules to include US Marines landing in Italy in several different World War II wargames.
• Scenarios for Avalon Hill D-Day.
• An article on how to find opponents.
• A funny article about hard-to-understand rules by other publishers.
• A suggestion to use the combat results table from Winter War in any of several recently published games that had combat results table that made it hard to actually destroy enemy units.
• A snarky commentary on the "point superiority combat results system" some publishers had (unfortunately) used in recent game designs (with bad results).
• An article about using the rules and counters from the game NATO on a map from any World War II Russian Front game. The same article went on to create a World War I variant.
• A variant for the Fall of Rome game in which a general tries to overthrow the emperor.
• A Starkrieg system to conduct interplanetary invasions using the old STRATEGY I game map and counters.
• A tactics suggestion for the game MARNE in which it was noted by stampeding the entire French Army off the map into Spain the Germans could then not gain enough points to win (as most of the
points game from destroying French units).
• A rule to create truck-mounted cavalry units in the game 1918, launching a blitzkrieg over three decades early.
• A list of OSS Field Divisions that assume that the US created SS-style elite divisions separate from the US Army, including the 1st OSS Division FDR, the 2nd OSS Division America, the 5th OSS Division Confederacy, the 10th OSS Field Division General Motors, and the 18th OSS Field Division Comanche.
• New scenarios for the game Midway.
• Vague ideas to build an electronic die-rolling machine.
• A list of actual historical wars that nobody had done a game about.
• Proposed rules changes for the game Trireme.
• Variants for Richthofen's War covering the Russian and Italian fronts.
• A variant for the Afrika Korps wargame using a map from the game Sinai allowing Rommel to (after crossing the Suez Canal) rampage into the Middle East.
• A variant of Panzer Armee Afrika that covers the earlier British destruction of the Italian Army.
• A variant for wooden ship naval games in which a small sloop armed with rockets could set fire to a ship-of-the-line.
• A historical note about the unusual British battleships Nelson and Rodney.
• Combining the scenarios of the game Sinai into a campaign.
• An article about adding gigantic tanks to armored miniatures. Such tanks moved slowly but their huge 160mm guns could destroy a Sherman tank on the far side of the battlefield.
• Some comments introducing Napoleonic miniatures gaming to the readers.
• A survey of recently published science fiction games. At the time, the term "sci-fic" was actually in widespread use.
• Variants of several published games (WW3, Sinai) covering a campaign in Mesopotamia.
• A variant to DIPLOMACY for the Dark Ages.
• An optional "Command and control" rule for Diplomacy.
• A comparative review of the SPI game War in the East with the GDW game Drang Nacht Osten.
• Ratings for the play-by-mail games Kriegsmarine, Challenge, and Halocaust.
• Errata for Rigelian Wars.
• Letters to the editor.

As you can see, the editors and writers packed a lot of stuff into 24 pages, but things were about to change for JagdPanther. Issue #8 would see many changes (to the 11" bound magazine format).

JagdPanther #7 marked the end of an era.

Written by Stephen Cole