The Battle for Europe is a closed-end, military strategy, play-by-mail (PBM) wargame.

The game centers on Europe while including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Canada.

Turnaround time is how long a player has to prepare and submit "orders" (moves and changes to make in the game) and the company has to process them and send back turn results.

[3] The company processes the turns and returns the results to the player, who completes a subsequent order sheet.

[10] The initial choice of a PBM game requires consideration as there is a wide array of possible roles to play, from pirates to space characters to "previously unknown creatures".

[15][e] Chris Harvey started commercial PBM play afterward in the United Kingdom with a company called ICBM through an agreement with Loomis and Flying Buffalo.

[17] For approximately five years, Flying Buffalo was the single dominant company in the US PBM industry until Schubel & Son entered the field in about 1976 with the human-moderated The Tribes of Crane.

[19] In 1981, some PBM players launched another company, Adventures by Mail, with the "immensely popular" Beyond the Stellar Empire.

[15][f] The proliferation of PBM companies in the 1980s supported the publication of a number of newsletters from individual play-by-mail companies as well as independent publications which focused solely on the play-by-mail gaming industry such as the relatively short-lived The Nuts & Bolts of PBM and Gaming Universal.

The PBM genre's two preeminent magazines of the period were Flagship and Paper Mayhem.

[25] The game centers on Europe while including North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Canada.

[23] Special Commanders and Training Programs are additional factors players can employ, the former to influence the success of operations, for example, and the latter to increase the effectiveness of units.

[23] Diplomacy plays a significant role during gameplay, although there is a privacy option to prevent contact with a player.

You can start in Northern Russia and end the game battling for the city of Gibraltar."

[32][h] Donald J. Lund, the organizer of the PBM Player's Guild of the period, reviewed Victory!

Although he suggested "more glitter" for the maps and more photos in the rulebook, he stated that "this game and company are quality".