Rebuilding situation templates

The card stock situation templates found in PanzerBlitz are just cool. The follow-on games Panzer Leader and Arab Israeli Wars provided the situations in the Rules booklet instead separately on card stock, which is arguably a step backwards in game design. It definitely changed the look and feel of the games.

Over the decades, a large number of situations and scenarios have been developed by fans, including a couple of dozen which attempted to mimic the original design of the PanzerBlitz situations. While some of the earliest managed to come very close (Situations #14 - #25), most scenarios end up looking a bit rough as scanned images get repeatedly copied.

Hence, an opportunity: develop freely available situation templates in an open vector image format, which can be used by anyone.

Current progress

The image below consists of a an underlying PDF image which was mostly likely converted from a jpg-generated scan. Vector graphics have been traced over using Inkscape (free), the different colors to help indicates what has been traced and what has not.

If you see an offset between the scan and the tracing, it's an artifact of the browser and the Inkscape SVG variant. Once the template is complete, the format will be changed to standard SVG for portability between browsers and other SVG editing applications.

Fortunately, one of the most important design elements of the situation cards is handled. The card's title font is Compacta Bold, for which there exist a freely available, limited font set.

Many challenges remain:

• Use the correct dimensions, or at least commonly accepted dimensions for the red stat and German cross.

• Determine the sans serif font used for the text of on the situation card.

• Determine the serif font used on the mapboard numbering.

• Determine the font used on the counters.

• Finishing out the counters for populating situations.

• Resizing for printing on letter or A4 card stock, with crop marks correctly sized and located to match the original cards.

Those are the big challenges. Smaller challenges include ensuring line weights are consistent between elements, counters align properly on the template, and surely more.

Extending situation card design

The first goal is to replicate the existing situation design as faithfully as possible. The situation cards are an incredibly important part of the PanzerBlitz experience, and deserve to be rebuilt as closely as possible to the original design.

However, the PanzerBlitz game system can accommodate far more than the original 12 situations. New mapboards allow much bigger forces over larger battlefields. An extensive number of WWII archives from the former Soviet Union are now accessible, allowing more accurate scenarios to be developed, and to provide historical context. Decades of game play has resulted in a body of knowledge representing "best tactics" for each situation.

Given these advancements, it seems natural to extend the situation card template to a full 8.5 x 11 inch (letter) size format, while retaining all the original design elements for continuity with the original game.

This new, larger card size would have many benefits:

• Easy to punch for ring binders.
• Along with historical notes, variations in OOB, setup conditions, and victory conditions could be proposed, increasing replay potential for each situation.
• Extending the template to include the back of the card provides room for designer attribution and notes, hints for game play, and more.
• From a production standpoint, no cropping would be necessary.

The possibilities greatly expand with a larger format!

Would you like to help?

It's easy, download Inkscape for Mac or Windows, clone the source for the repository, and make a small improvement. When you're done, send a pull request, I'll merge it in.