Most of the titles qualify as "monster games", a subgenre of wargames featuring extensive orders of battle, a complex ruleset and usually a large game-map area with a detailed representation of the terrain they cover.
When GRD's Winston Hamilton died in March 2001, Mill Creek Ventures (principal owner Carl Kleihege) bought the rights and took over production of Europa.
Current HMS owners Gar Olmsted and Arthur Goodwin (and formerly Cory Manka, who left in the midst of a legal dispute) are also familiar names to long-time followers of the series, appearing in the credits of a number of the games and/or as authors in the official magazine of the series and fanzine publications.
The magazine subscription is also a membership in The Europa Association, whose members also receive discounts on game orders and free copies of some of the "refit kit" materials or special maps.
Over the life of the series, a large number of official and unofficial play aids, rules variants, fanzines, and other Europa-related materials have been published.
Starting with issue #45 in 1989, the subtitle was changed to The Independent Europa Newsletter in response to GRD's acquisition of the trademark and publication rights for the system.
The Europa series had its beginnings as a project by Paul Richard ("Rich") Banner, Frank Chadwick, and Marc Miller[1] 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.
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 of Operation Barbarossa by several weeks and may have contributed to its failure.
The game was finally published in 1979 as Marita-Merkur, named after German operations Marita and Merkur carried out during that campaign.
However, it was published as a stand-alone game; by this time the Europa concept of covering the entire European theater had evolved, and the plan called for publishing a series of stand-alone games that provided Europa material, but concentrated on a single campaign and left most of the link-up issues to be addressed by future publications.
Europa X - Potential involvement of Spain and Portugal in World War II, including the planned German assault on Gibraltar.
Europa XIII - Expansion module giving a bigger picture of the Soviet war effort, plus updates and play aids for FitE/SE, and a scenario for the 1943 campaign.
Mill Creek Ventures also continued development of Total War, the third edition of Europa I, and has offered it for preorder since 2003.
There was once a freely downloadable set of "Boot Camp Rules", a simplified ruleset to help people get started with the Europa system.