Longest game

It was 1990, I was 18 years old… I moved to the big city of Toronto and my new friends were gamers who played Risk all the time. I quickly got bored of it and was looking for an alternative game I could introduce to them and I saw on the store shelf Axis & Allies from Milton Bradley “a game of high adventure” and “decide the fate of the world in just a few short hours” (lol). Unfortunately we were all pretty hammered by the end of the night and the only thing I remember of my first game was punching out all the plastic pieces from the plastic stencil racks and all the roundels from the cardboard sheets. it was an instant hit with the whole group and I played it with them religiously for up to 2 years until I moved back home to Peterborough. I brought my game with me and it wasn’t long before I hooked some old high school friends to it, and over the next 8 years I played Classic edition even more than I did before. After that in 2000, I moved back to Toronto where I discovered Spring 1942, then A&A Anniversary edition and finally Global 1940… ironically, I met someone from that first group from the early 90’s almost 20 years later, we accidentally bumped into each other online and we have been playing 1 on 1 1940 Global games every month for the past 5 years.

That’s sweet but now I don’t know what to do with it.

Well,

Origins has come and gone. It is Monday morning the day after and to say the least, Origins was somewhat of a big disappointment overall.

For those that have been there before, Origins, next to GEN GON, was a big, CON event that many came to from all over the country. Not so this year. Attendance had to be down regardless of what they say…that would be GAMA. And one of the main reasons had to be that there were no big companies present. WotC/AH, Wizkids, Upperdeck, FantasyFlight(well they had a small booth with no one in it.)literally!, and more were NOT present. Nothing but a bunch of small vendors selling magic and can you say POKEMON! Yes, I would have to say that 50% of all people there were probably connected in one way or another with the big flying Picachue…? I guess gas prices really are affecting travel plans this year, and rightly so…

Ok, now onto the AA stuff. This was even disappointing. Over al,l our numbers were done extremely, as well. Even so much so as to only have two tourneys this year. Our annual Mega Tournament and Guadalcanal.

We had a very small mix of people show to play a few other variants but not enough to have a tournament for those games. I think we had 2 Europe games played, one Bulge, one D-Day but they ended up playing Revised and no Pacific games. This even goes for the minis. We had a total of 4 show up for that over the three days and unfourtunelty, none of them at the same time…sigh…so, we only had one game in all played…

Not a good showing…but as for the Guadalcanal tourney, typical first year event, we had eight for this event and it went very well. Games seem to last not as long as we expected (around 2 hours per game) and a congratulations goes out to Mike Davis of Cincinnati who won this tourney. Great job Mike. Tournament rules included rolling dice for sides, first one to 15 VP wins but if a tie ensued, tie-breakers were: most islands controlled, undamaged airfields remaining and capital ships remaining. This came in handy in one game were once the game was over, both sides had 15 VP but once you ad the others, Jake beat Brian 25 to 24…VP…

As for Revised, for all the smack talk that goes on between AA players, you would think that there would be a bigger effort to come and play but this year we only had 9 teams, 18 showed up to play for this qualifing tourney. Not bad but considering the past 5 or so years, it sold out! So, with that being said, having 9 teams and not wanting to give anyone a bye, I myself and Squirecam stepped in to fill the void. After winning the first two games, we both thought, no need to just throw in the towel at this point. So, we held on to win the whole thing. We managed to go 5-0 to the title beating a GREAT team of Hurley/Furegson in the final.

They made one big error by vacating three areas of the board to KGF and it back fired. Japan took India, control of the Pacific and the Suez Canal and pretty much the control of the world to a victory. All Gemany had to do was hold on to enough countries, even as much as to lose Western Europe and the vicotry was in hand. Germany even went as far as buying a third round carrier to help fight off the onslaught on British transports in the end. It helped so much as to reduce the number of incoming Transports from 12 to 8 and hence securing victory. I do not have the exact final IPC count, Furgeson might have that on his lap top but I believe it was around 200-151.

The team of Squirecam/Smo63 plowed their way thru the Swiss rounds with a 3-0 record counting up victories or 196-155, 197-154, 195-156. And then in the Semi-finals fight a tough battle vs. the team of Yope/Eirc. Yope has the final score on that one and the final, as mentioned above…

We had teams from all over the country playing, we even had a team from CA. Charles McHaffie and company…so, thanks to all that ventured out. I hope you had a good time and see you at GEN CON…

Anyhow, that is my story and I am sticking to it…have a great day!

Peace,
GS :-D

You can play online go to www.axisandalliesworldclub.com you can play with no CD patch our new patch out in 4.1. This patch fixes bugs and creates a better AutoSave and some more. The name of out club is aawc and we have 2v2 play with leagues and 1v1 play with leagues and tournaments. The name of our 2v2 is Squadron(Squad) and Mercenary(Merc). Anyone and everyone signed up to aawc can play in Merc. In Squad you must be on a team to play. You can join a team or create 1 but you have to have people to create one with or you must have a captain agree to let you join. The name of our server is WarZone, which has 5 different servers on it with A&A, Outlaws, Panzer General 2, Risk2, and total Annihilation.    Hope to see you on the zone.

After a quest for the perfect map, we even used a projector to enlarge and trace out other maps; I finally found the map that I was going to use.  The map is 13’ x 9’ made from a wallpaper material and comes in 8 sections.  I positioned North and South America to my left side and Japan and much of the Pacific Ocean on the far right side with Europe and Western Russia positioned in the middle, just like the game map is set up.  I trimmed off a bit off the top and the bottom of the map so to make access to the countries that much easier, The final result was 13’ X 8’ which fit very well on (4) 4’ X 8’ sheets of plywood, (the fourth sheet had to be cut down to a one foot strip to get the thirteen feet.  The sheets were raised up to about a waist level platform to make playing the game much easier. On one section (mostly comprised of Africa) I made that section removable (just rolled it out and away).  Spaces - The sea spaces were rather easy, I simply used the maps latitude and longitude coordinates.  The lines intersected and created blocks, these blocks made up the sea spaces for my navies. On land, each individual country was a move space which made the game that much more authentic, awesome actually.  Russia and Asia, I used very thin (black in color) vinyl car pin stripping (you can get it at any auto parts store), it is very sticky on the one side and it allowed you to contour out the territories throughout Russia and East Asia.  The pin stripping worked very well, because if you screwed up the contour lines you can remove it and put it down again till you were satisfied with your boundaries.
I am in the process of moving so I took down the map (ruining it - because of all of the staples) but I purchased the map in the laminated version which should be better because it will be easier to clean and it should be more resistant to warp age due to humidity. This time I may place it on my platform and place Plexiglas on top of it to hold it in place and without damaging it.

http://us.st11.yimg.com/store1.yimg.com/I/mcmaps2000_1884_94036

Because of the size of the map I can easily get much more pieces on it.  After much trial and error, my brother and I were able to give each country an increase of between 10X – 20X the original game amounts. The Navy’s got about 10X the start up amounts across the board (i.e. where you had one battleship in a sea space now you had ten).  Land units, the increases that were added were logical to balance the game as best as possible. Such a large map, Germany needed some increases to sustain much further rounds because of the large borders that it had to defend and attack from. Russia got some increases to counter.  UK got some increases in southern Africa (when I say increases I am referring to more than the 10x from the original setup).  Japan got some increases (I am not with my notebook but I think some increases to the Navy as well) The US got a little bit of an increase as well to counter.  Again, we had to be very careful not to provide too much power to any one power.
In the game we did some other changes to increase the fun and realistic factors.  First, let’s start with game play; in the original you play Russia, Germany, UK, Japan and USA in that order. (kind of boring for the axis player as he must wait till the ally player to play out USA then Russia before the axis player got a chance to play, and with this map it can take awhile so we changed the play to – Germany(Europe), Russia, Germany(Southern Europe and Africa), United Kingdom, Japan, and then USA….  Again I don’t have my notes with me but rules were in place as to how Germany was done twice. I.e. you can’t move German troops or aircraft into Southern Europe then move them again in Germany’s second turn.  The money is 10x the original.  In the original game, UK was at 30 IPC at the start, with this you start at 300, the price of the items stayed the same – battleships cost 24 Pick’s etc.
The map had over 2000 pieces on it, so I had to create a computer program to play out a battle.  With so many pieces it took forever to play out one battle (could have 100 – 200 pieces in a single battle).  So a computer program was necessary to make it easier and faster to do these battles, the program also had to follow the original format exactly.  You simply enter in the amount of each attacking and defending units that would be in the battle, the program follows the protocol and has a random rolls generator to count up all the casualties.  We changed it from a 6 sided dice to a 38 sided dice to allow for much more fine tuning of the odds for each of the units. I.e. to get a one on a six sided dice it is 1 out of 6 or 16.6666 %, 2 or less would be 33.3333%, 3or less would be 50% and so on.  On a 38 sided dice to get a one would be 2.63%, 2 or less would be 5.26% and so on.  I’m not going to go into why a 38 sided dice was decided on, I’ll just say we liked the odd numbers that the odds provided, to get 50 percent it would be 19 or less.  I mean we could have choose a 80 sided dice or a 100 sided dice but didn’t feel it was necessary to fine tune it that much, plus we wanted it to still be rather unpredictable outcomes that we felt higher side amounts may not provide you with. Yet enough sides that you would be able to fine tune it much better than 16 % at a time.  Other rules were set up as well, a lot of the rules and techniques where put into place to prevent crazy arms races that just made the game unrealistic and also took strategy out of the game.

Other advances we used were paratroopers, under the water moves for submarines (invisible moves for subs, a secret log must be kept by that player and the subs must surface by at least the third turn to recharge the batteries.)  Didn’t want subs last position to be off the coast of Japan and end up off the coast of England, wanted it to be realistic. (the log prevented cheating of where you were going also keeps you informed of how many moves that were left, also if you didn’t do your log right you could run aground).  Fortified tank and Infantry positions (higher levels of defense) could be purchased.  Recruitment centers and smaller more affordable but capture able and destroyable factories (used red hotel and green houses from Monopoly).  The factories (red hotels) were a bit cheaper but had production limits.  The recruitment center’s, (green houses), are purchasable. Infantry can be added directly to that area, (Russia got 2 of these in Siberia in its initial setup.  Recruitment centers are not capture able nor are they destroyable, but if that country or territory is enemy occupied the other person can’t use them.  Destroyers were always the Holy Grail that I just could not find (or at least at a reasonable price) until now with the revised edition, I can buy the destroyers at a reasonable price and they will match the game properly.  Destroyers were always considered for the game, they were included in the rolls generator program, just never had them till now.  They are an obvious major improvement to the game; the game should have had them from the start.

Without my notebook on hand I can’t remember everything that we were able to do, but if you have any questions I can get it and try to answer any questions with more detail.  I will not say I am smarter than anyone else I just created this game because I liked it a lot and with a lot of fine tuning and trial and error allowed it to become what it is now.  I played an Army colonel once (I won), he was very impressed with the game and recommended that I somehow market it or at least the computer program.  I don’t see how I could market it but I am glad I found this forum so that I could tell others of what I was able to do with it and in our opinion possibly one of the best massive board games to be played.  Like I said it is massive and you really start to see why historical leaders did what they did as you play through the game, yes, the results are changeable and unpredictable but certain things allow you to recreate history in an incredible way.  If you have any questions about the game please feel free to ask me either here or at my email address peterrabbit19079@yahoo.com  At this time I am not prepared to sell or give away the computer program,  sorry.

Sounds good but a little confusing GG. I don’t think I want to get World at War because from what I’ve heard it does usually take all day. Sorry.

I think we were the axis becuse we were more agresive

This is true. To get down to the nitty-gritty: as Germany you start the game making 32 IPCs a turn, right? So if it was just you and USSR in a straight fight, you’d waste them in a few turns, right? Problem is you’ve gotta deal with the threat from the Western Allies at the same time–and still have enough money to grind down Russia. That is the tough part. The trick is holding off the Western Allies from invading Europe WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE IPC INVESTMENT, so the vast majority of your IPCs can be spent against USSR. You MUST increase your economy in order to have enough $$$ do do this. The more you can weaken USSR’s buying power, the better–try strategic bombing Karelia and hope you get lucky. Get your ally (Japan) to help by bombing USSR as well. The Allies will gang up on you–gang up on them whenever you can! Watch what USSR buys carefully–it will clue you in to what you need to buy to counter it. Remember as attacker you have the option to retreat–against USSR, at least, any battle where you score more hits against them than they against you can be a victory: the war against USSR is an economic war, and whoever can best manage their resources correctly will get stronger and stronger, while the enemy gets weaker and weaker. And the best advice is to play a few games as the Allies: once you get a feel for their tactics and strategic needs, you will be able to anticipate some of their moves and take measures to counter them.

Ozone27