I’ve posted several times here about how much I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Kickstarter-funded Battle of the Bulge iPad game from Shenandoah Studio. It’s a turn-based military strategy game in the style of old board games of this type.

I grew up playing those sort of board games, and loved playing them despite the fact I have a younger brother who was and is a far, far better player and strategist than I am. So when I first saw this iPad game as a Kickstarter project I was filled with excitement at the prospect of seeing it come to the iPad. My first hope was that it would meet its funding target – and it did and even substantially exceeded it.

Fast forward a few months and I have been lucky enough to be one of the beta testers for the game leading up to its upcoming release. So … two bits of great news to share with you on that front:

1) The developers hope to have the game in the iPad App Store by Christmas.

2) The game is looking, and playing, great.

Hit the break for a couple more screenshots and a few more thoughts on it …

Here’s a look at the game screen. I’m playing as the Axis in this one and the pre-dawn surprise attacks have just begun on the morning of December 16. My Axis troops are the blue units, the Allies are green. You can see the symbols on the units to indicate tanks and infantry unit types.

Here’s a shot of the victory screen after one of my (very rare) wins against the game’s AI:

The game is already looking solid and big fun to play. It lets you challenge the AI or online opponents – and I’ve been doing both and enjoying it greatly, even when getting my butt kicked by other testers. It’s more than challenging enough for me, as a lapsed board game player who hasn’t played these sort of strategy games regularly for many years. I also showed it to my brother, who is still a genius at these sort of games, and he gave it a big thumbs up as well.

I won’t give too much away here. I’ll just leave off by saying that if you ever enjoyed old school board games of this type, or you just like turn-based strategy games, you are definitely going to want to take a look at Battle of the Bulge when it hits the iPad App Store.

In the meantime, check out the Kickstarter project page for Battle of the Bulge or the Shenandoah Studio site for all the latest news on the game.

UPDATE: The app has been submitted to Apple for approval, so it should definitely be released before Christmas barring any unexpected snags or delays in the App Store approval process.