East Front Trilogy
The Europa series had its beginnings as a project by Paul Richard ("Rich") Banner, Frank Chadwick, and Marc Miller to produce a series of three wargames to cover the entire Eastern Front of the Second World War at the operational scale — that is, with more detail than a strategic simulation would provide, but less than a tactical simulation would provide. The trilogy was to include:
| German | English | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Drang nach Osten | Rush to the East | A game to cover Operation Barbarossa and the Soviet counter-attacks over the winter of 1941-1942. |
| Unentschieden | Undecided (or, Stalemate as in Chess) | An expansion kit to provide maps and orders of battle to allow play of Drang nach Osten to continue until the end of 1944 if neither side had achieved victory by then. |
| Götterdämmerung | Twilight of the Gods | An expansion kit to provide maps and orders of battle to allow play of Drang nach Osten and Unentschieden to continue into Germany in 1945 if neither side had achieved victory by then. |
The titles appealed to the historical Drang nach Osten concept and the mythological Götterdämmerung concept as symbols for the epic struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Banner, Chadwick, and Miller founded Game Designers Workshop (GDW) to publish the trilogy. The game rules were a merger of Chadwick's earlier system for ground combat with Miller's earlier rules for science-fictional space combat adapted to represent WWII-era air combat (both had published earlier titles reflecting those interests). Banner served as art director for the project.
GDW released Drang nach Osten and Unentschieden in 1973. DNO was one of the very first "monster" boardgames. Due to an expanding range of interests that the developers wanted to pursue with their successful new company, Götterdämmerung was indefinitely postponed by GDW, and will never be published as originally conceived, due to a greatly revised plan for the series. The scope of the expanded series is covered more thoroughly below.
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