The following description is based on the slowly fading memories of a single participant in the described playtest, who played a marginal role in the game and sadly did not contribute as much as he should have at the time. If any of the former participants in “Italy’s War” are still around, we would very much welcome their contribution and corrections.
Italy’s War was an unofficial project in the late 90ies to take a small step towards they mystical unicorn of Grand Europa. It combined elements of several games (Western Desert, Balkan Front, Torch and others) to assemble OOBs and maps for the whole of the Mediterranean Theater, from Spain to Iraq, from Bulgaria to East Africa. At its heart, however, was a new approach to the Europa naval rules, based on the concept of treating naval units not as unit counters like their land-bound Army brethren, but mission-oriented like air units. Something like it had not been attempted in Europa since, and would sadly not be tried again.
The first playtest was organized via the new Europa mailing list in 1998, and ended spectacularly when the Axis player assembled all available ressources, temporary reinforcements and assets into a combined air-sea-land-operation to take Malta on the first turn, which, as most people agreed, broke the game. Undeterred, several players started project Europasee in 2000-01 which planned to address the playtest results within a full framework of naval rules. However, this project unfortunately got caught in the implosion of HMS, and never made it to another round of playtesting. Confidentiality prevents us from publishing the Europasee-material, but the original OBs and Rules for Italy’s War are available here.
The OOB material are copyrighted by GR/D and presented here with kind permission,
Rules for the playtest of “Italy’s War”
(zip file, 7033kb)
Orders of Battle for “Italy’s War”
(zip file, 276kb)