1967 - Sword of Israel

Playbook edition. It will include everything that was in the boxed version: 869 die-cut and silky-smooth playing pieces, eight heavy cardstock maps and 50 scenarios.

1967: Sword of Israel takes a modified version of our Panzer Grenadier game system to the Six-Day War. The Israel Defense Forces face the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which sounds kind of daunting except that the Israelis actually had a slight edge in numbers, a significant edge in firepower, and an incalculable edge in training, morale and leadership. On top of that, except for a handful of Egyptian commando battalions that made it to the West Bank in time to fight alongside the Royal Jordanian Army, the three putative Arab allies did nothing to aid one another’s war efforts.

The Israelis are at their peak in this conflict, and top to bottom are easily the best army we’ve shown in any of our tactical games. The Jordanians are actually reasonably good, except for their leadership, but they have the bad luck to face the Israelis. The Egyptians aren’t very good, but the Syrian Arab Army is awful by design – Defense Minister Hafez al-Assad (father of Syria’s current president) deliberately identified the army’s 400 most intelligent and capable officers and then had them all executed to assure that no one would be left with the ability to organize a coup against the Ba’ath regime.

While the Israelis have all of those advantages, the one thing they don’t have is time. The Soviet Union and United States tacitly agreed that they would like to see the Arabs – in particular, Egypt’s President Gamel Abdel Nasser – severely chastised, but not destroyed. The Americans did not want to see the Arab states grow powerful enough to threaten American interests, while the Soviets considered that a serious but not total defeat would make the Arab states dependent on Moscow.

The Egyptians might have had a chance to do that in the actual war, but the commander of Egyptian troops in the Sinai, Abdel Hakim Amer, suffered a severe panic attack on the first day of the war and ordered a general retreat. His Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, went through the same ordeal but unlike the Egyptians, the Israelis had other leaders ready to step up and take command. So after the war’s first day, the Egyptians are usually trying to extricate their forces from the onrushing Israeli juggernaut.

The scenarios in 1967: Sword of Israel are usually larger than the typical Panzer Grenadier battle: Israeli success in 1967 in large part depended on getting there first with the most. They crammed a lot of tanks into a little area, and the Arabs tried (unsuccessfully, for the most part) to counter them the same way. That makes for battle with dozens of tank platoons on each side – in other words, exactly what you’ve always wanted.

1967: Sword of Israel pre-dated this format, so the re-issue seemed a fine opportunity to re-cast the game.

The Playbook edition still has the same 50 scenarios, which were broken between the three fronts of the Six-Day War (Sinai, West Bank and Golan Heights) but otherwise simply presented in chronological order – as scenario-based wargames have done for the past 50 years or more. The package will include the standard, separate rulebook, so you don’t have to deal with a fat, unwieldy single book. To help keep its price below the magical $100 barrier, the game now comes in Playbook format rather than in a box.

The pieces are our beautiful die-cut, silky-smooth little works of art. We call them that because first, the material takes ink really well – we can’t use most of our older artwork because the sharp reproduction exposes flaws once invisible to the eye (that’s the beauty part). The silkiness comes from a coating applied to them that feels like silk (it isn’t actual silk).