@CWO:
It’s hard to tell if A&A WWI 1914 will open the door to more WWI-based games, but here’s another thought on the subject. With WWI about to be covered by the new game, and with WWII well covered by the previous ones, could this open the door to future games based on conflicts during the inter-war period? The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 would be one possibility. So would the Japanese incursions into China which began in 1931 with the annexation of Manchuria and culminated in the outbreak of full-scale war in 1937. There’s also the Russo-Japanese border conflicts of 1938 and 1939, thought these were fairly limited affairs. Closer to WWI, there’s the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921, which could be rolled into a single game – perhaps even with the Turkish War of Independence of 1919-1923 tossed in at the margins. Personally, I don’t think it’s very likely that we’ll see any A&A games based on these wars: they were on a much smaller scale than WWI, and look at how many decades it took Larry to designing a game around that conflict. But it would be nice to have a chain of games spanning the period from 1914 to 1945. Playing them consecutively at a weekend gaming convention would be an interesting exercise.
Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that Larry Harris will produce an “Axis & Allies” based game without the USA in it. He hasn’t yet, not even a small scale game like battle of the bulge or Guadalcanal. Which, on one hand, I can understand since the US is probably their biggest market for these games. How many people here would buy a “Spanish Civil War game”? Probably not many.
I was intrigued by the Singapore game on FMGs, but I haven’t jumped the gun because I’m not sure I can get anyone to play- I have a hard enough time to get people to play Axis & Allies WITH the US as it is.