Tannhäuser, yo!

I played the boardgame Tannhäuser at GenCon. While the game itself certainly isn't bad (I had a good time) I honestly think that the real strength of that game is the setting and the artwork.

For the uninitiated, the idea essentially is that it's 1949 in an alternate timestream. The Great War (WWI to us) never ended, but dragged on into a semi-Cold war state. The Alliance (US and Brits, I presume) have reverse-engineered crashed alien technology (from Roswell?) to get cool weapons, while the Kaiser's troops have taken to demonology to get their special weapons. Future expansions look to expand into what the Soviets are doing as well.

Freakin' awesome. However, what it really prompted in me was a desire to utilize the material for an RPG. That brought me around to my old attempt at developing an alternate history; in mine, the aesthetic was similar, but I got there a little bit differently. Hitler died earlier, and the Nazi party was taken over by the Wehrmacht, and actual competent leaders. The Germans got the bomb first. Anyway, I'll spill all the details later, but the short version is that the cold war happened with four superpowers rather than two; the US, the Soviets, the Nazis and the Japanese. I also thought about layering in some Hellboy and X-files type occult/alien secret history, so it really does end up being nearly the same.

Anyway, I'll try to post the details of that later today, but in the meantime, here's some images cribbed and cropped from the Tannhäuser site so you can see what I'm talking about.