the subtitle was changed to The Independent Europa Newsletter in response to GRD's acquisition of the trademark and publication rights for the system. This fanzine was an important focus for fans of the Europa system during the years when GDW was sidelining the system and it had not yet been turned over to GRD. Currently, HMS has an official Europa website at hmsgrd.com. The site has information about the availability of published games, the status of games in production, plans for future games in the series, information about The Europa Association, downloadable errata sheets, and other material of interest to Europa players. East Front trilogy The Europa series had its beginnings as a project by Paul Richard ("Rich") Banner, Frank Chadwick, and Marc Miller to produce a series of three wargames to cover the entire Eastern Front of the Second World War at the operational scale — that is, with more detail than a strategic simulation would provide, but less than a tactical simulation would merit. The trilogy was to include: The titles appealed to the historical Drang nach Osten and mythological Götterdämmerung concepts as symbols for the epic struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Banner, Chadwick, and Miller founded Game Designers Workshop (GDW) initially to produce educational simulations for university classes. Drang nach Osten and Unentschieden were the company's first commercial releases. The game rules were a merger of Chadwick's earlier system for ground combat with Miller's earlier rules for science-fictional space combat adapted to represent World War II-era air combat (both had published earlier titles reflecting those interests). Banner served as art director for the project. GDW released Drang nach Osten and Unentschieden in 1973. DNO was the first commercial "monster" board game. Due to an expanding range of interests that the developers wanted to pursue with their successful new company, Götterdämmerung was indefinitely postponed by GDW, and will never be published as originally conceived, due to a greatly revised plan for the series. The scope of the expanded series is covered more thoroughly below. Expansion from trilogy to Europa The ostensible trilogy began its expansion to cover the entire European theater when the developers published a game on the German 1940 invasion of Norway, Narvik, in 1974. They then started working on a game to cover Germany's unplanned 1941 Balkans campaign to overthrow the governments of Yugoslavia and Greece, which some believe delayed the onset