A midway point in SPI’s exploration of tactical games begun with Tac Game 3. The game follows Red Star/White Star, an earlier effort covering roughly the same period. Here, some of the anomalies of the earlier game are cleaned up and new rules are added. The single large board of the earlier game are replaced by more elaborate boards highlighting differences in elevation which were noticeably absent in Red Star/ White Star.

The enthusiasm for tactical armor games is not too surprising in that the conflict in Israel had led to significant advances in armor and many of the folks playing SPI games were people in the military.

Not all theaters get the same emphasis as western Europe. The Middle East and Far East have only a single scenario each. The conflicts in the Middle East would be covered more thoroughly in SPI’s October War and Avalon Hill’s Arab-Israeli Wars.

A note, too, that SPI produced another game down the road covering the same theater but with an entirely different set of rules called Mech War 2 which actually consisted of two separate games, Red Star/White Star covering Western Europe and Suez to Golan covering the Middle East.