Panzer-Jagd

For decades The Avalon Hill Game Company meant board wargames: hex maps, cardboard counters and rulebooks that ran to several pages. In the early eighties the firm opened a computer division and began porting that same approach to home micros. Panzer-Jagd, released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, comes from that line and shows it immediately, with a top-down view, units rendered as symbols, and an emphasis on decisions rather than reflexes.

Armoured warfare was natural territory for Avalon Hill, whose tabletop catalogue included an extensive range of Second World War land combat titles. What the computer took over was the part of the board game nobody enjoyed: tracking range, line of sight and resolving each engagement against a table. That leaves you with the decision itself, where to move, what to fire on, and when it is better to sit in cover and wait. The game is single-player, with the program handling the opposition.

It helps to know what this kind of software looked like in 1984. The presentation is functional rather than impressive, the pace is slow, and your first session will drag until the rules click. The reward is a strategy game that has aged rather better than the action titles of the same year, because it rests on decision-making, and decision-making does not date. On OldGame.cz Panzer-Jagd runs directly in the browser with no C64 emulator to install, which removes a fair amount of setup from a game of this type.