A bit late with this one as the news really comes from last week, but we’re on a bit of catch up here at Wargamer.com this morning. So no Monday announcement of a Deal of the Week from Matrix Games this week, however, last week they released Decisive Campaigns: Case Blue on Steam with a 50% discount off that runs for a week – so I guess that makes it sort of a Deal of the Week, just not a Monday to Sunday week …

Well here in the UK we are in the aftermath of a general election with all the celebration, despair, and the like that goes with finding the results. However, perhaps appropriately, this coincides with the 70th anniversary of VE Day, the end of World War 2 in Europe – although Russia doesn’t mark this until tomorrow, 9th May. So as we in the UK consider the outcome of our democratic process, perhaps we should also take time to consider the sacrifice and struggle of those who fought in the Second World War.

One of the greatest enduring and accepted myths of the Second World War, and one originally promulgated by the Nazi German propaganda ministry, is that the Polish Air Force was surprised, caught on the ground, and completely destroyed in the opening hours of Germany's undeclared blitzkrieg war with Poland. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Here, John Dudek looks at those very first days of the war and their aftermath.

Gary Grigsby doesn’t do small games, we know that. However, it seems he also doesn’t do small updates. Matrix Games have just announced an update to War in the East and the explanatory notes run to 100 pages !!!

Most PC gamers – my sons included – impetuously eschew the manual in favor of diving right into the tutorial or the proceedings themselves. Not me! I want to slowly savor every inch of those printed pages, sometimes reading the instructions twice before daring to click on that “start” button. There’s nothing quite like a well-written game manual complete with all the historical background necessary to better understand that particular military endeavor.

No game is perfect on release – despite the (usual) claims of developers and, especially, publishers. Patches and updates are always needed even for the most polished offering. Slitherine’s Vietnam ’65 is no different and last month we brought news that an update would be forthcoming in May. With this now imminent Johan Nagel, the game’s developer, has exclusively given us an insight into what is coming.

We can usually find a military anniversary or two in any given year, however, those which are round numbers always seem to be much more significant – especially when you are dealing with centuries. So we are currently in the midst, and shall be for 3 more years, of World War 1 centennial anniversaries. But those are not the only ones. In addition we have the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. And the first of these has attracted the attention of American Civil War aficionados, NorbSoft.

Here is our weekly public service announcement about the Matrix Games Deal of the Week. OK, this one is a day late, but over here in the UK yesterday was a bank holiday and your editor was doing bank holiday stuff – in this case waterproofing a tent; rock and roll lifestyle huh …

Maybe it’s because I’m a Brit and we’re much more aware of the European action in WW2, but the vast Pacific Theatre has never really been of much interest to me. However, that may all be about to change thanks to the release of Order of Battle: Pacific by Slitherine. With basic game mechanisms that are similar to games such as Panzer Corps it looks like it will be easy to pick up and play and so on that basis I set my sights on the Far East and fired up the game. Here are my initial impressions.

Over the last couple of weeks Slitherine have been pushing their new “Panzer Corps Plus” game, Order of Battle: Pacific, pretty hard. It certainly seems that they’re seeing it as one of their bigger releases for this year – indeed “a game that takes wargaming to a new level by upgrading every single game element and rebooting the genre for a new generation of players” according to the PR …