Ok, I've given away my conclusion: I really really REALLY like this game. Now before I give my full review, a few disclaimers and clarifications:
FYI, I've played 10 times, 2 solitaire, 1 with 4 players, 4 times with 5 players, 3 times with 6 players. So my sense of the game is perhaps limited. But I thought it was important to get a few more reviews out there because I really think this game deserves the love.
Second, I'm not <PERSON> (bless his hard-working heart) who seems to love 90% of the games he reviews. I'm often a grump where games are concerned. If I love you, great; but if you don't measure up, I sneer and throw you on the trash bin.
Next, I got this game with no preconceptions. I was shopping at my FLAGS and saw this on the shelf and thought, hmmm. I glanced at some good ratings on BGG so I knew it wasn't a total gamble, and bought it. Usually when I do this I'm sorely disappointed. (I'm looking at YOU Dust Tactics). This time I got lucky.
Finally, my background: I began life as a wargamer (Avalon Hill games, Tactics II, Blitzkrieg) but have steadily moved in a more Ameritrash and Eurogamer direction. Most of the time these days I'm playing Agricola, Terra Mystica, Age of Conan etc.
So now the review...
Overview
Quartermaster General is a card driven game which tries to roughly simulate World War 2. It can play from 2-6, scaling up beautifully. (And strangely, having more players usually means the game goes faster.) Its clean mechanics and lack of dice make it feel like a Euro Wargame. (But only if you think that's a good thing!)
Components
The quality of the components is very good. The board is a solid piece of cardboard, vaguely Risk-like in appearance, although with fewer provinces, and with a turn and victory point track going around the edges.
The pieces are wooden tanks and ships. They aren't especially evocative (I'd prefer some fancier more tank-like or ship-like sculpts) but they do the job and are much nicer than some silly cardboard chits. A big shock when you open the box is how few pieces there are. 366
The bigger countries have a total of 10, the Soviet Union 8, Italy 7. Not to worry, the game design makes the small piece count work perfectly.
The cards are excellent quality, safe to riffle shuffle (although I still don't because, well, you know, neurotic). These cards will clearly take a LOT of playing. I don't love the art on the cards. It seems too generic and I don't like that the images are the same for all the countries--although the flag waving in the background changes, of course. Obviously, opinions differ. Many people simply love the card art. [And the art has grown on me since first penning this review.] A bigger beef is that the detail text on the cards is smaller than it should be. It's not crazy tiny like some games (Imperial Settlers) but it was small enough to make life harder for one of my fellow players (to be fair, the room WAS dim). I don't want to exaggerate this, my 51 year old eyes did fine, but if you generally use reading glasses, you may want to keep them nearby for this game. However, I think my card quibbles are exactly that: mere quibbles.
Play
First, learning to play is a breeze. The rules aren't complicated and the rule book is well written and clear, with pictures and examples. From scratch, I think you could be up and playing with 20 minutes. I explained the game to a group of first time players in about 10 minutes.
Game play is super clean. You have a hand of 7 cards, you play 1 and only 1, you discard any cards you want to dump, you count your victory points and draw your hand back up to 7. SUPER SIMPLE! The only tricky part is remembering to move your victory mark up the victory track after every country's turn.
Cards do essentially one of six things: destroy 1 neighboring unit (battle), build a unit next to an existing unit, set up a status, set up a response, wage economic warfare, trigger an event.
Status cards are always active cards that can effect play as the game goes along. They stay face up in front of you for the rest of the game. A sample status card: the Germans have a card that increases the damage done by every subsequent submarine card.
Response cards are played facedown and then turned up whenever the owner wishes, usually as a response to something the enemy has just done. 993