Tiger tanks molded in the Japanese Colour.

[Jackal]

I have Tiger tanks molded in the Japanese colour. I have 5 tiger tanks with Germany aswell so theres no problem with playing, just got the wrong Japanese tank model :(

Any1 else got similar problems with the pieces?

[knp7765]

This isn’t really a “problem”. They are supposed to be like that, it’s the way they made the game. The Axis both share the same sculpts and the Allies all share the same sculpts.
If you check you will also find the Japanese fighters are FW 190s and the Japanese bombers are He-111. Also, all the German ships are Japanese models (Akagi carrier, Kongo battlecruiser, etc.)
Same with the Allies. All three use the IS-2 tank (Russian), P-40 Warhawk fighter (USA), Lancaster Bomber (British) and so on.
WOTC did this to keep this game cheap in cost.

[CWO Marc]

It’s a situation which has happened in earlier games too, though not to the extent of the 1941 game.  Most games for instance have given American submarines and transport ships to Britain and Russia, and up till the new edition of AA1942 the UK and the USSR also got American howitzers as artillery pieces.  Britain got American Sherman tanks before it received its own Matilda tanks a few games ago – which at least makes historical sense, because in WWII the US did indeed supply the British with Shermans.  Some of the other foreign-equipment situations we’ve seen before, however, have been laughable: the Italians using combinations of German and Japanese equipment in Anniversary, and the French using the same pieces as the Russians (including Russian-design tanks, battleships, cruisers and destroyers) in Europe 1940.  The 1941 game is the first one, though, in which the Americans have had foreign equipment, the funniest example of which is the use by the US of IS-2 Russian tanks, which are named after Joseph Stalin.

[Jackal]

@knp7765:

This isn’t really a “problem”. They are supposed to be like that, it’s the way they made the game. The Axis both share the same sculpts and the Allies all share the same sculpts.
If you check you will also find the Japanese fighters are FW 190s and the Japanese bombers are He-111. Also, all the German ships are Japanese models (Akagi carrier, Kongo battlecruiser, etc.)
Same with the Allies. All three use the IS-2 tank (Russian), P-40 Warhawk fighter (USA), Lancaster Bomber (British) and so on.
WOTC did this to keep this game cheap in cost.

@CWO:

It’s a situation which has happened in earlier games too, though not to the extent of the 1941 game.  Most games for instance have given American submarines and transport ships to Britain and Russia, and up till the new edition of AA1942 the UK and the USSR also got American howitzers as artillery pieces.  Britain got American Sherman tanks before it received its own Matilda tanks a few games ago – which at least makes historical sense, because in WWII the US did indeed supply the British with Shermans.  Some of the other foreign-equipment situations we’ve seen before, however, have been laughable: the Italians using combinations of German and Japanese equipment in Anniversary, and the French using the same pieces as the Russians (including Russian-design tanks, battleships, cruisers and destroyers) in Europe 1940.  The 1941 game is the first one, though, in which the Americans have had foreign equipment, the funniest example of which is the use by the US of IS-2 Russian tanks, which are named after Joseph Stalin.

Allright i understand what you guys are saying, however in the rulebook if you look on the page “unit profiles” the Japanese tank is different. It shows a small Japanese tank with a short gun.

[CWO Marc]

I don’t have my copy of the 1941 rulebook with me, but as I recall it doesn’t have a detailed unit table like the 1942(2nd ed) game does (http://www.axisandallies.org/p/axis-allies-1942-second-edition-preview-units/).  The pictures in the AA1942 detailed table do show correctly the shapes of all the individual sculpts.  The 1941 rulebook lacks such a table, so it’s possible that whatever illustration they used next to the unit types weren’t intended to match one (or either) of the two sculpt types provided in the game for each unit type.

[Der Kuenstler]

Just spraypaint all your tigers German grey (you’ll likely need more than 5 anyway) and order some Japanese tanks from historicaboardgaming.com.

[Yavid]

rulebook has different units that came with the game. check out the fighters the US fighter was suppose to be the P-38 again

[knp7765]

@Jackal:

Allright i understand what you guys are saying, however in the rulebook if you look on the page “unit profiles” the Japanese tank is different. It shows a small Japanese tank with a short gun.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Even with the new sculpts in the 41 game, the shapes shown in the rulebook are from previous versions of the game. I guess they just didn’t want to bother redrawing them.

[lozmoid]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Even with the new sculpts in the 41 game, the shapes shown in the rulebook are from previous versions of the game. I guess they just didn’t want to bother redrawing them.

A real pity, that. Maybe they should have just skipped this whole section in the rulebook; it’s virtually irrelevant for the 1941 game anyway.

[Yavid]

@Lozmoid:

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Even with the new sculpts in the 41 game, the shapes shown in the rulebook are from previous versions of the game. I guess they just didn’t want to bother redrawing them.

A real pity, that. Maybe they should have just skipped this whole section in the rulebook; it’s virtually irrelevant for the 1941 game anyway.

I thought maybe the idea of the new pieces came later as an after thought “oh this is how we get our old customers to buy the game” sort of thing. And they never bothered redrawning the pics in the rulebook.

[lozmoid]

Sometimes it’s the little things that bug me, like the fact that the UK Tank silhouette has detailed treads and the other tanks don’t. It’s like, let’s have some consistency here please! Blimey…

[CWO Marc]

@knp7765:

@Jackal:

Allright i understand what you guys are saying, however in the rulebook if you look on the page “unit profiles” the Japanese tank is different. It shows a small Japanese tank with a short gun.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Even with the new sculpts in the 41 game, the shapes shown in the rulebook are from previous versions of the game. I guess they just didn’t want to bother redrawing them.

Actually, I think there may be some confusion here between the 1941 and 1942 rulebooks.  The 1941 rulebook does in fact correctly show that each equipment sculpt comes in two versions – an Allied one and an Axis one – and the pictures shown do match the 1941 sculpts.

In the 1941 rulebook, the line of pictures for each piece is Allied / Axis / Allied / Axis / Allied (maroon, grey, tan, orange and green), showing three Allied sculpts of one design and two Axis sculpts of another design.  If you compare the tank pictures to the sculpts, you’ll see that the Allied IS- tanks (both sculpted and pictured) all have the same smooth and elongated shape while the Axis Tiger tanks all have the same squared-off, blocky appearance.  It’s in the 1942 (revised) rulebook that the tanks are all different, including the short-barreled Japanese tank that was mentioned by Jackal.  The pictures shown for all the units in the 1942 rulebook appear to match the 1942 sculpts.

[robbie358]

Boy, if the Japanese were cranking out Tiger tanks in World War II, India and China would’ve been screwed.

[sgtwiltan]

Yep, someone got their rulebooks mixed up. The 1941 rulebook is reflective of the pieces as is the 1942 rulebook.

[CWO Marc]

@robbie358:

Boy, if the Japanese were cranking out Tiger tanks in World War II, India and China would’ve been screwed.

Tiger tanks had very high fuel consumption rates, which would have been a problem for Japan, where fuel was a valuable strategic commodity.  A bigger issue regarding their use would have been terrain, however.  I’m not familiar with eastern India’s geography, but next-door Burma has got very tough jungle terrain that would have been problematic for tanks.  As for China, Japan’s fundamental difficulty was that China was simply too enormous to control, apart from the coastal regions and parts of the interior (such as cities and areas along railway lines).  A slow, lumbering beast like the Tiger would have been no help in taking control of all that space.  It would also have been a waste of firepower: the Chinese had no armoured forces, so the Tiger’s huge armour-killing gun would have had no worthwhile targets.  And as Harold Coyle’s novel Bright Star illustrates, shooting individual infantrymen with a tank’s main gun is an inefficient (though spectacularly destructive) method of fighting.

[Yavid]

i dont’ have '42 2nd edition but I do have '41. In my '41 rulebook they show units that have been in previous games such as the P-38 and T-34s instead of showing P-40s and IS-2s. If you pause the box opening preview video at 2:15 mark you can clearly see I’m not the only one with P-38s in my rulebook.

[sgtwiltan]

page 22 through 28 of my 1941 rulebook clearly show the unit silhouettes in their country color while some of the movement illustrations do show older pieces.

[Asterios]

people have to remember that when the rules were done up along with the pics for said rules, that the pieces were not available for the pics as of yet, so they had to use previous pieces from other games for the pics.

[Yavid]

that’s really interesting. because as I’ve said before it’s very clear in my rulebook the units are the old units.

[Variable]

Yavid is in fact correct. When I had Dave’s game, the rulebook had the pics of the old sculpts as shown in his video. I just opened the rulebook that came with my game I received from CoolstuffInc last week and, low and behold, pics of the new pieces! Apparently the mistake was caught and updated before too many copies were printed. Someone owes Yavid an updated book!