Tannhauser is a classic skirmish game which means that it involves moving little soldiers around on a map so as to fight other little soldiers. Depending on how one defines a skirmish game there must be hundreds to thousands of possible competitors. In this review I'll try to explain what makes Tannhauser better than most of the competition.

OVERVIEW OF GAME PLAY
The basic game is very simple. You unfold the map, choose your miniatures, set them up and roll initiative. The player rolling the higher number [on a d10] decides which side will go first and that side activates a piece. The piece can now perform a move, at any time during which [beginning, middle or end] it may take an action. Then the other player activates one of their pieces, and so on alternately until everyone has moved/acted. Actions include attacking and various contests either with other players or with the board [thus achieving "objectives"]. All contests in Tannhauser, including attacks, work in the same way: the attacker rolls some d10s, counting 1-5s as failures and 6-10s as successes. Various circumstances allow one to add to the basic die roll but a 1 is always an unqualified failure and there are some circumstances in which 10 counts as a super-success. Then the defender rolls some dice and counts their successes. The side with the higher number of successes has won the contest, which can have various effects, the simplest being that the loser drops one or more levels of health.

So far, nothing special. And this is a VERY good thing, and key to why Tannhauser is such a class act. The basic mechanics of skirmish games have been around for ages and there really isn't a better way to do it than variable initiative and alternating turns. The people who designed this game KNEW THIS, and DID NOT FEEL THEY HAD TO SLAP ON A FANCY NEW MECHANIC JUST TO SHOW HOW CLEVER THEY ARE.

WHAT'S DIFFERENT AND EXCELLENT ABOUT TANNHAUSER
The key difference between Tannhauser and ALMOST all other competing games is that there is NO possibility of arguments arising over who can see or shoot at what [Wings of War and Axis and Allies miniatures are the other famous ones]. This is because the squares [actually, circles] on the board are colour coded, sometimes with only one colour, sometimes with several. If a circle shares a colour with the one you are on, you can see it and shoot at anything on it. If it doesn't, you can't. This is a BRILLIANT piece of game design which instantly removes the main source of bad feeling from skirmish gaming. [You'll find some people who disagree with this, claiming that they never have arguments over who can see what. Avoid such people, my friends. Either they are bullies or they don't know very much about skirmish gaming.]

OTHER NEAT THINGS ABOUT TANNHAUSER
I titled this piece "A Gamer's Skirmish Game" and I want to explain a little more what I mean by that. The designers have taken enormous trouble to remove all the potentially annoying things from the game. Thus, the pieces are nicely pre-painted, individual but instantly identifiable as to which side they are on. All the information you need to play the game is on the board, which is a cracking little piece of gamer artwork in its own right. And, get this, the game comes with an adequate supply of ziplock plastic bags for storing all the counters!!!!! Yes, there are counters, and the people who designed this game KNOW that you need zip-lock bags so's not to lose them!

WHY TANNHAUSER ISN'T 100% PERFECT
I thought about titling this section "What's wrong with Tannhauser?" but the truth is there is nothing specially wrong with it, by which I mean that any criticisms one can advance about its game play either are criticisms of all [or at least, many other] skirmish games, or they are things that some individuals might find annoying whilst others might find them good or at least accept them as part of the "flavour" of the game [combat is fast and brutal, for example: whether that's a good thing or not is pretty much entirely personal preference, it seems to me]. Hoever, I do think the flavour of this game is one of its weaknesses. It is supposed to be set in an alternate past where the Germans and Allies are still fighting out the Great War in 1949. In "Reality" it is a Pulp Game, think Indiana-Jones-in-the-Army versus Evil-Nazi-Occultists, some of whom are Cute-but-Evil. In short the back-story is a bit embarassing, though by no means as toe-curlingly awful as that of Crimson Skies, for example.

ODDS AND ENDS
The Tannhauser rule-book is nice to look at but a bit difficult to plough through compared for example to the excellent Battlelore manuals. Characters can be customised and advanced with equipment and skills and so far we haven't detected any major game-breaking combos that arise from this: on the contrary, normal grunts can still challenge and hurt heroes [a good thing]. And the game is cheap compared to most of the competition and VERY VERY cheap compared with things like Warhammer FB and Clix.

CONCLUSION
This is a seriously good game and if you enjoy skirmish games and agree about line of sight/shot being their major weakness you should consider getting it. Because it is so simple it is susceptible of development and home-customising, a feature it shares with Battlelore. Recommended.