Global Team game when it comes out!

Maby if the allies are winning they could make your stay at the game verry annoying.
Once japan lost its fleet and has the US parked around its mainland its as good as dead.

So maby the allied player could first capture all the islands japan has with a single transport. Your turn will consist of skipping because no money and nothing to move. Allied player will have all countries to play with guess you will get bored from the game.

I would really like to here the communities take on this subject. Praises and criticisms. I realize I’m late to the ball, but here I am and I’ excited about getting into this game.
Here is my take.

This board and map are great.

I love the hugeness of it; this thing is just massive.

The geography and how that effects play was very well thought out. Africa is squashed down abut as much as possible and there is more room available in Europe as one could have reasonably made without completely distorting the world map. The point being , the map still looks like the world while still being able to provide effective space for game play- that is a tough balance to achieve.

The idea of making the Himalayas and Sahara impassible was inspired. Of course they are impassible to large armies. If the Axis want to do damage to the British Empire in Sub Saharan Africa, they need to either turn the corner at Alexandria or win the Atlantic or Indian Oceans.

The neutral spaces are very well done. More on that when I review the Neutral Countries.

But the main thing the map gets right is what it’s supposed to get right, it provides the right geometry to promote good game play. Their are major regions and regions within those regions and each set has its own keys to being manipulated for offense and defense. That makes for interesting game play.

Even better, I haven’t found any rinky dink ways of manipulating the geography in ways that don’t feel true to the intent of the game/WW2. The space in the Pacific is an obstacle. The Space of Russia is an obstacle. As they both should be. The benefit from gaining Scandinavia is big, but its not a game changer. The Far East or the Black Sea can’t be used as some unanticipated flanking move. One doesn’t want to be tied down to replaying WW2 as accurately as possible, but one doesn’t want to completely break with reality either.

Every game I play I learn new things about this board. I’ve played 4 intensive games with myself and am still feel like I am a long long ways from mastering the geography of this board. That is a good thing.

Certainly there are things I could quibble about.
The names for the Chinese Provinces could be better. In that , as someone who lives in China, I would prefer the proper current Pinyin names for them, A westerner defiantly made this game. But I understand they are trying to keep with the Pre 1949 feel for the region and using the terms the west used back then; so ok.

Having Kazakistan so far south is a bit weird.

There are times where I wish certain spaces were larger; I’m looking at you Bessarabia and SZ110. But most of my spatial problems stem from my style of game play which is still rooted in monolithic stacks of enormous proportions which worked well in the Axis and Allies of old.

Which brings me to my biggest opinion about this board. This board is infinitely superior to the previous incarnations of Axis and Allies.

This is a very good and interesting game and it starts with the map.

What are your thoughts?

Over a year ago, there was a discussion thread somewhere on this forum (I can’t recall in what section) about GTO’s demise.  As I recall, GTO was supposedly saying that it was shutting down temporarily and that it would return sometime in the following year with a new game that it would be offering in some kind of partnership with Larry Harris rather than WotC.  The details were quite vague, and nothing seems to have come of that initiative…assuming that it was indeed an initiative that had any substance to it, rather than just speculation.

2nd edition and Alpha 3 are almost the same.  There are differences, I think, mostly in the unit placement. You can down load the rules from Avalon Hill and the set up charts are on this site for 2nd edition.

You can also speed the game up drastically by starting everyone at war including the USA. Yes everyone at war.

http://www.harrisgamedesign.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=9936

I agree with the thinking here that we should stick to OOB rules for at least a little longer. I don’t mind a few official changes here and there. I always use the errata and FAQ’s that are released after a game comes out due to misprints in the manual or an obvious balance problem (AAP). However, these sweeping changes are too much too fast. Its almost like a few influencial people screamed too early and no one else was able to say, “lets slow down and take a more methodical approach to the changes.”
It seems like we are being caught up in a rushing river and can’t get out. Alpha is evidence that the squeaky wheel gets greased.

I will stick to OOB rules until something official comes out and then evaluate it. If there are a few reasonable changes I will use them, but if it is anything like these Alpha changes, I most likely won’t. I never used LHTR for the same reason.

just printed mine out and they look great.  thanks again!