Pyramid Pick
Gear Krieg Wargaming Companion
Published by Dream Pod 9
Written by Alex Rhodes, Lloyd D. Jessee, Dave Graham, Robert Beck and Pat Paulsen
110 b&w pages; $17.95
Gamers like blowing the crud out of stuff with giant walking tanks.
Somewhere in the corner of our collective soul, there is a spot that yearns for giant clanking metal behemoths armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. If there is such a place, it is probably right next to the part that makes shooting Nazis so satisfying. Gear Krieg, Dream Pod 9's war game of pulp super-science should have delivered both. It didn't. I wanted to bestride the battlefield like a colossus, every panzer in sight meat for my guns. It was not to be. The "gears" (the walking tanks or panzer mechs) in the rulebook were early war models (the book only covered up until 1941) and like their real life counterparts in the tank world, they were slow, under-armed, and unreliable.
The Gear Krieg Wargaming Companion advances the time-line to 1943 and the gears are most definitely in the house. The newer gears -- the General Jackson, the Donner, the Uller, and the Wagsworth, among others -- are all faster, more powerful and more heavily armed than their early war brethren. These boys can take most light and medium tanks in a toe to toe fight and still go places they can't. Gears still need support from the dull old tanks and infantry, but they're not the joke they used to be.
The vehicles and equipment section is a mixture of mid-war equipment . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 17, 2001
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