Possible free For All?

@SuperbattleshipYamato I like the ideas/rules you mentioned. I will follow through on triple a.

@The-Captain

Thank you for clarifying!

@hengst If this feels too strong for the Allies, move the SZ 96 cruiser & destroyer to SZ 81. Otherwise, it forces the UK to choose between prosecuting the war against Italy & liberating the Vichy boats. If they don’t turn them all Free French, they may have a serious issue on their hands on G2. Similarly, it forces Germany to decide: do I want to kill French ships or force the UK to make a play for them.

After that, France will be a very minor yet present actor in the campaign for North Africa & eventually the retaking of Europe. If the UK ensure to liberate Syria, they may also fight in the defense of Cairo.

I haven’t seen somebody gamble on a Vietnam play, but that is also possibly in the cards.

It sounds like you might enjoy Risk: Europe! It’s available for only about $30, and it features free-for-all battles across the old world of europe with a more complicated economy and army structure than classic Risk.

I don’t think the A&A 1914 board is well-suited to a random objective deck…you’d be investing a lot of time in fiddly setup, beancounting, etc. only to have someone win all of a sudden because they had an easier-than-expected objective card that they drew at random, or because you guessed wrong about what their objective card was and blocked them out of the wrong territory.

Thanks for the input guys, I made some adjustments and changes, and will republish a new version with some updates based on your suggestions as I integrate them.

BEF:  I agree that putting them in London is easy.  I think those two UK pieces on Paris are some of the fluffiest on the entire board, yet they are always killed on turn 1.    I wanted there to be a flexible choice;  keep the pieces in france and make taking france a bit harder (thus altering the basis of the G1 opener), or put some pieces somewhere else to keep them guessing.  This is different than a bid because part of the purpose is to make France a bit riskier to take, and to make a new reason for Germany/Italy to want to kill it quickly even though there are 4 UK units there.  Also, UK can counterattack Paris on UK1…

French Guiana;  a friend mentioned this; I added the concept that they can place naval units offshore.  However, I didn’t want to give the French the ability to place infantry there because I don’t want them to be able to simply walk to brazil and take it over.

New Hebrides; isn’t a territory.  New Caledonia is.  I wanted FIC and new Caledonia to be potential new places to put a small French thorn in Axis’ side

Cruiser vs Fighter;  Great point; 12 is pretty much their entire budget.  I didn’t think it was very apt to give them fighters, because armor, fighters and tacticals are bread and butter offensive units.  I wanted to make France more like China, where its choices are limited and it cannot build an attack stack in the same manner as a regular power.  If we permit the French to have fighters, we would have to come up with a different explanation of why they get them (not assorted naval forces but secret aircraft factories?) and they are extremely gamey (fighters do a lot.  adding them in means that I would choose them over anything else.  Id buy fighters wherever I was allowed to and send them on desperate defensives and sorties).

Part of my thinking here is that France already has 2 cruisers, which occasionally live.  This and the single fighter from UK would be their only “3” attacks, and then only during an amphib, and therefore be the only offensive contribution france could make.  I didn’t want to give the French the full range of choices because I like the idea of them remaining a nerfed power, but one that could raise a force of infantry and even transports, but not much more punch or mobility than that allows.

Thanks for the discussion and please continue.  Taam.

my group has toyed with something like this. It was fun, but some countries get so overpowered its ridiculous.

@Daedelus:

Maybe this would unbalance the game, but Franco’s Spain had been a close ally of Germany in the 1930’s and this could represent Germany’s constant nagging to repay the favor.
[…]
Thoughts?

It could be an interesting game option.  Historically, though, Hitler did try nagging Franco but got nowhere with him, for instance in the discussions over the projected Operation Felix (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Felix).

@Funcioneta:

A small bug in UK deploy: z2 should have a cruiser instead of a dd (same as vanilla game). I’ll correct it as soon as I can

Done