Sure it’s only in Europe, but a Collector’s Edition of Achtung Panzer: Kharkov 1943 has been announced.

I’m not really big on CEs in general. My office is a cluttered enough space without even more crap to deal with. A DVD on German tanks is a nice idea, but the History Channel has probably told me all I really need to know. I don’t think I have much room on my walls for posters, and the ones I do have are pretty hideous. I much prefer to put up maps and tech trees from games.

But boy is it nice to see a bona fide wargame get some CE treatment. Now let’s be honest, what they are throwing in here isn’t that much. And I’m not sure what the price will be. And it’s for Europeans, who still treat strategy gaming like a AAA genre.

As for Achtung Panzer itself, I really like it. I want to work up a proper post about it and how it compares to other real time wargames. It’s really not like a lot of other games out there. It has a turn based setup phase, which I haven’t really seen anywhere and that looks like nothing else on the market. If you have a battle, you have a deployment phase (like Combat Mission) and then a real time battle where you rush around the map seizing victory points. I still need to make sense of how all the phases fit together. Rob Zacny has played more of it than I have, so keep an eye on his blog.