I had to reply here, because I remember all the mistakes that me and my friends made the first few times we played…
In the beginning we also thought it was free for all. And, because the first few times we played we didn’t have the rulebook (in classic), we thought that the dice were for the movement, so we would move our units with the dice. We even bought units, and then sold them and bought them in another place…
Then, we learned how to play better, but we still made big mistakes. We made kamikazee attacks with planes, or we allowed them to land anywhere. We landed Bombers on carriers. We mixed land and water battles… It was so mixed up…!
First game, we allowed armor(edit- all units for that matter) to attack ships off shore.
You win.
I concur, that is up there.
I never had problems like any of those. I had actually played a counters and hexes war game (an intro one) prior to my first game of A&A. A&A seemed comparitively simple. Between the battle board and the cards it almost explains itself. But then I read the rule book. They gave me US and the rules and said “Read this and pay attention. You should be okay when we get to you.”
Now it took some time to gain competency with all the rules and playing well. Could still use some more competency at playing well.
This is more of a classic thing, but from the first game I was subjected to house rules…every power had it’s own thing.
Russia: 2 IPC infantry from the first round
Germany: Subs hit on a 4 or less on attack and could retreat from combat before shots were first fired; armor ATT/DEF at a 3
England: AA hit on a 3 or less
Japan: BBs took 3 hits to sink (8 IPC to fix each hit); fighters could crash into unit of choice for an auto-kill, no defense shots
USA: Could rebuy any destroyed mechanized unit at 2/3rds original cost (rounded down.) Destroyed Armor: 2 IPC to rebuild. Destroyed BB, 16 IPC to rebuild. Destroyed AC 10 IPC to rebuild. Destroyed Fighter 8 IPC to rebuild, you get the idea.
Needless to say, no one ever heard of bidding before. :)
I always played Germany when we began to play: my strat was to only buy tanks, and if uk and usa were pressing too hard after some round, I built subs and… more tanks!
By that time, Russia was buying bombers and tanks, UK was going all out on Ic and destroyer (hey, Germany had subs), and Japan was only fighting USA on the water.
We were always screwed up with planes when there were islands and AC…
Here is one I am sure that every Revised player will appreciate…
My first game of Revised ever (and the archive is still on these boards…)
All-out German attack on Caucuses.
I think y’all can appreciate how badly THAT went :-)
Wow, I had a really different first experience. We had a group of 5 people raring to go, but we had to wait till the weekend. We’d already pre-decided the teams, and my teammate and I (I was Japan, he was Axis) stayed up for hours the night before the match planning out our strategy. We searched the rules, and set up the board and played out a mock run of the first turn. It’s scary how close to forum convention we came actually. Our first turn strategy was “Kill the allied navy.” and we basically succeeded. We were all lousy at logistics, being a first game, but the Axis had the ships already, so we had a clear advantage. Axis took over every Allied capitol. In terms of mistakes, I think we only make one big one. We didn’t know there were already fighters on the carriers at the beginning of round 1. WOOOOOOOPS! Mostly screwed me in hindsight, but that’s okay.
In my first game I played Russia (playing 2nd ed)
I was at first dismayed to see that all targets seemed well defended.
Then I saw it…
Sinkiang!
I attacked Sinkiang on R1, and took it.
By UK1, the tournament organizer comes, over, glances at our table and shouts:
“What the hell does a Russian armor & control marker do in Sinkiang!
After I haphazardly explain, he again proclaims, over the entire convention hall, at the top of his lungs:
“All right everybody, listen up! The game is played as the Allies vs the Axis! This is not a free-for-all!â€
God, that was an embarrassing moment, if there ever was one. :-D
Dude, that’s hilarious.
The tournament was played w/o bids. That would have made the game totally lopsided of course. Therefore – all newbies were given the Allies. All experienced players were given the Axis.
The Japanese player began saying something when I shoved my units into Sinkiang, but he was quickly hushed by the German. :-D
Do I have to say that we lost the game??
Submarines as Russia :lol:
The first time I played A&A there was five of us, and only two of us had played before. I played as Britain and on Germany’s first turn he attacked my battleship outside Gibraltar with four fighters and his submarine. And my battleship sunk everything with only taking one hit from the submarine in the first round. :evil:
The Soviet Player just huddled in his terrorities, and when the United States player and I wanted him to attack, he would respond, ‘no my units will die.’ The German player sunk the British fleet turn three with heavy bombers. I bought Rockets and traded IPC with Germany using my bombers versus his heavy bombers. The American player couldn’t dedide whether he wanted to attack Germany or Japan. The Japanese player matched the United States fleet in the Pacific. We conceded, even though we still had the advantage…
I have no idea what version it was. A friend of mine, Kurt, invited me over to play while he was downloading something over his 14.4 modem off of some ftp server somewhere. Anyway, he was Axis and I was Allies. I played the Russians by buying a mix of things. I know I bought fighters, not sure on how many tanks or infantry. I played them aggressive. Always attacking towards Germany. I was not sure what to do with England or America so I bought tech and bombers. eventually, both had Heavy Bombers and Long Range Aircraft and I kept doing Strategic Bombing Runs against Berlin. The tide started to turn at that point because I would blast away most of his income leaving him a few IPC’s for a handful of infantry. I completely ignored anything that was not Europe. I eventually lost due to the Magic 84 rule, I had forgotten about it, because I just let the axis control all of Africa and most of Asia. That actually made me mad because I was sure I could have cracked into Berlin within a turn or two. :x I was practically knocking on the door with huge stacks of Russian units and I had a ton of US & UK bombers. That and I had some amazing early rolls, I think. He was a good sport about it and pointed out that if I had done Torch with the US I could have avoided it for a bit longer and probably would have won. I literally had not touched/moved a single US or UK land unit the whole game.
