Blitz! A World in Conflict is a grand strategy game where players fight all the battles and manage all the economies of the five major powers who fought World War II: Germany and Japan for the Axis, and for the Allies: the Anglo-French Alliance (Great Britain, France, the British Commonwealth nations, and all of their colonies), the United States of America, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Developed in cooperation with the Australian Design Group, Blitz! A World in Conflict brings the award-winning tradition of World in Flames™ into a re-imagined format that is much faster to play, with beautiful components, while maintaining World in Flames’ premiere historical accuracy.

A Few Thoughts from the Designer.

(1)  Where does Blitz! fit in the pantheon of World War 2 games?  I view Blitz! as a step up in historical accuracy from the Axis & Allies family of games.  If you like Axis & Allies but want to try a game that is a bit more complex (but not too complex) then Blitz! is for you.  Blitz! gives you historically realistic views of the potential capabilities of each major power.  For example in Blitz! Germany can build up its fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers a lot more than it did historically.  However, it would not be plausible to imagine that a German BB & CV fleet could ever rival the potential of the US Navy.  Like Axis & Allies, Blitz! plays very quickly, and nearly all of your time as a gamer is spent doing the “fun stuff” — launching attacks and building units so that you can launch even better attacks next time.  Blitz! does have rules about supply, cooperation among allies, and the like, but these were designed to be “quiet” rules that don’t demand a lot of mental effort to follow.

(2)  Just a brief word about my “inspiration games”.  These are games that I loved playing (and still love to play) and which no doubt had some influence in how Blitz! is shaped.  Two of the most prominent are Hitler’s War, and the War at Sea / Victory in the Pacific duo. I liked Hitler’s War so much that I once made an entire Pacific expansion set for it (back in the 1990s), to try to stitch together the whole war taking advantage of the neat land system.  With War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific, I always tried to combine the two to get a “comprehensive” naval system.  Blitz! is the combination of these two impulses: getting a neat strategic land system for all of WW2 integrated with an equally neat strategic naval system for all of WW2. Blitz! has the added bonus of integrated air systems, production, politics, and pre-war alternatives as well.

(3)  And of course the biggest inspiration game of all is World in Flames, the grand-daddy of all comprehensive World War II games.  If you want to really replay the war in all its possible permutations and in unbelievable detail, WiF is your game.  If I had unlimited gaming time, I may never had made Blitz! ~ I just would play WiF.  However, with games lasting 50 or more hours (and if you use all of the expansion kits, 100+ hours), WiF is a very large time commitment, the likes of which I simply don’t have the time to do very often.  Blitz! gives players all of the same strategic decision-making challenges of WiF, but in a much quicker-to-play format.