Interesting question. One of the basic problems with depicting WWII in a board game is that WWII was a conflict that grew in several major stages, with each stage bringing in one or more major powers who were not previously at war. And each stage, it should be noted, had very roughly the same structure: an initial phase of relatively rapid gains by the aggressor, followed by point where the initial offensive stalled, followed by a long period of grinding attrition warfare (punctuated here and there with major offensives). Japan invaded the main part of China in 1937, made initial rapid gains, then stalled. Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (which brought France and Britain into the war), then conquered continental western Europe in 1940 (taking just six weeks to do so), then stalled. Germany invaded western Russia in mid-1941 (which brought the Soviet Union into the war), got almost all the way to Moscow, then stalled. Between late 1941 and mid-1942, Japan overran Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies, and several British and American possessions in Asia and the Pacific (which brought the United States into the war), then stalled. In other words, the global picture of who’s in control of what, and of who the opponents are, looks very different depending on which phase gets chosen as the game’s starting point. This is why many of the global-scale A&A games, over the decades, have used mid-1942 as their starting point: it’s the moment of the war where all the Allied powers are finally in play (though the USSR didn’t go to war against Japan until August 1945), and the point where both sides are, in principle, the most balanced, with no clear indication of who will ultimately win the war.
