It´s here! The Enlarged Gameboard for use with Revised Edition 2004

@the-captain

Amazing!

Uh, it shows $135 on Amazon… not bad for sealed out of print. But yeah, I would buy 1942 and print one of IL’s maps to play on. The 1942 map is too small.

@Krieghund:

It’s true that SBRs are nearly a break-even proposition.  However, if they weren’t, they’d dominate the game.

The whole point of SBRs is inflicting damage that the enemy can’t afford.  The US is the only country that can really afford an SBR campaign, simply because it can afford the losses, while Germany can’t.  The US sacrifices its own income to suppress Germany’s so that the UK and USSR can take advantage of its weakened state.  This is not really pointless.

If SBRs were a money-making proposition, there’s no way that the Axis could survive, since they start off economically inferior to the Allies.  The Allies could simply build a few bombers to SBR with, then devote the rest of their income to defense.  Eventually, the combined toll of the bombings would render the Axis powers bankrupt, then the Allies could move in for the kill.  Doesn’t sound like a very fun game, does it?

The strategy you’re describing sounds perfectly viable to me.

Lately I have been going heavy Kreigsmarine.  1 Carrier is silly if you don’t reinforce it.  2 Carriers, 4 Fighters, 2 submarines, maybe another transport in there, now you are forcing England to build navy, not ground forces.  That’s almost the equivalent of removing one power from the game right there.

I was thinking about this the other day and I thought it would be pretty cool just to make the game look nicer.  With AAM: WaS coming out next year, every piece in AAR could be replaced with minis on a board.  Theyll look way better than the regular pieces.  Of course some of the rare miniatures are a bit too large for the regular sized boardgame, but you can fix this problem by making a bigger board at Staples or something.  The only major problem I see is planes, since the War at Sea planes are going to be very small and the AAM planes are fairly large.  Anyways, what do you guys think about it?

sure, I’d play ya IRL.  But I’m in NYC and you’re around Chicago, I think, yes?

OH wellz, what can ya do?

Wow, what a thread!

I must say, I take NCS’s position on this one for several reasons, the most pertinant of them being that

a) While the Axis certainly CAN win without a bid, when you have players of equal skill and who are equally skilled at playing both Axis AND Allies (not just one or the other side), a bid can certainly make the difference in the early round(s) and many times it’s what happens the first 2 rounds that can help decide the game.

b) figuring out statistics is something that can only be done over thousands and thousands of games. I mean, you can flip a coin 100 times and get 90 heads. Does that mean the odds of getting tails are skewed? No, because if you were to flip that coin 10,000 times or 100,000 times the odds are it would be very close to 50/50 and 1,000,000 times or more and likely the difference would be so negligible as to allow us to say it was 50/50. While we cannot play 1,000,000 AAR games, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that a bid helps even out the game.

You know, just as many of the issues of AA Classic were worked out in AAR, I think probably in the next iteration (or version) that many of the issues we’ve seen here will be worked out as well. Maybe an extra unit here or another territory there… whatever it takes to balance the game.

Hmmm… sounds like I’ll have to do some sleuthing.