Best posts made by CWO Marc

Incidentally, I’ve just checked my table against yours (which is oriented horizontally rather than vertically)…

Game 1. Game 2. Game 3. Game 4. Game 5. Game 6 Game 7.
----1---------4---------6---------2----------7----------3---------5
----2---------1---------7---------5----------4----------6---------3
----3---------5---------1---------6----------2----------4---------7

…and I see that we got the same results in three of the cases and similar but different ones in the remaining four, so it looks as if the problem has at least two valid answers. This is is good news because this suggests that even your five-player matrix should be workable in at least one way.

@Midnight_Reaper said in A&A Unit Identification Charts:

Also, let me thank you for all the work you put into this. It is both practical and beautiful and I think it’s great work, top-notch in all aspects.

-Midnight_Reaper

Much appreciation. I enjoyed putting those charts together. I own a WWII atlas that was actually published during the war, and which contains all sorts of interesting information about the military situation around the world, and one of the sections at the back has a recogniztion chart of Allied and Axis aircraft, depicted as black silhouettes. It’s a neat feature, and it was the main inspiration for the A&A unit chart project

In terms of game rules, I don’t have an answer, but in real-world terms military personnel aren’t the same thing as jeeps. Having Nation A use the troops of Nation B isn’t really Lend-Lease, it’s more along the lines of inter-allied cooperation, and that’s problematic for two reasons. Reason one (and WWII offers lots of examples in relation to the British and the Americans in 1944 and 1945) is that of senior military officers can be reluctant to serve under (or cooperate with) another nation’s senior military officers, Montgomery and Patton being a good case in point. Reason two is more subtle. Even with the best of intentions on everyone’s part, military forces from different nations generally can’t function as a single unit or even in close cooperation without a good deal of training for that specific purpose (as the short-lived ABDA found out in early 1942). Even when they speak the same language, different armies have different doctrines and practices, not to mention differences in nuts-and-bolts details like equipment and weapons and communication protocols. Even within the same nation, different services can find each other’s combat doctrine incomprehensible. The US Army and the United States Marine Corps in WWII sometimes ran into trouble because of this in the Pacific, one nasty example being the so-called “War of the Smiths” during the Marianas campaign in which a Marine General (Holland M. Smith) relieved an Army General (also named Smith) of command. During the Cold War, NATO devoted a lot of effort to the question of inter-operability (joint training exercises, standard small-arms ammunition calibers and so forth) for precisely these reasons.

An interesting article which mentions that Navajo, which is perhaps the best-known example, was one among many Indigeneous languages – notably Mohawk, on which this story focuses – used in WWII to send hard-to-crack coded messages.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/louis-levi-oakes-code-talker-obituary-1.5153816

I think I’ve found a way for you to work out your five-player matrix without too much trouble. I tried to see if there was a reasonably systematic / programmatic way to work out the answer for the simpler case of a three-player matrix; there is, and you should be able to scale it up. It’s a manual process that involves checking things – but it uses a process of elimination, so some parts of the process get shorter as you progress, which makes it manageable.

It also breaks the problem down into stages, so that you don’t have to try to figure out all the variables at once by an excruciating process of trial and error. Crucially, it first determines only the issue of “who plays with whom in each game”, and it leaves until a second stage the issue of who plays which turn order position.

Here’s the approach I took, after studying the photo you posted (which answered a lot of my earlier questions).

For clarity, I designated the players with numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.), and I designated the turn order positions with capital letters (A, B and C). You might want to give Roman numerals to the games.

I started with Player 1 (hereafter just 1). The game has three turn order positions, and therefore also has three players per game. 1 has to play once in each turn order position, which means three games. There are three players per game, so at each game 1 plays against two opponents. The opponents are required to all be different at every game, so this means that 1 will play against six other people, numbered from 2 to 7. Thus:

1 plays against 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7

Since it’s a three-person game, this translates into:

1 plays against (2 & 3) and (4 & 5) and (6 and 7)

All three of 1’s match-us are now spoken for (though note that we haven’t yet nailed down which turn order position he plays in each pairing; that will come later), so we can turn to the next player to consider. Here’s where the process of elimination comes in. The next player to consider is 2. If we were replicating the pattern of this line…

1 plays against 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7

…you’d think this that corresponding “2” line would look like this…

2 plays against 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7…

but in actuality it looks like this…

2 plays against 4, 5, 6, and 7

…with two numbers (1 and 3) eliminated because 2 has already played against both of them. (The systematic check to apply at every step of this procedure is the question, “has this been used before?”)

At first glance, if we follow what we did with 1, this…

2 plays against 4, 5, 6, and 7

…translates into…

2 plays against (4 & 5) and (6 and 7)

…but if we apply the “has this been used before?” test we see that (4 & 5) and (6 and 7) were both used with 1, so we can’t use them with 2. Switching two of the digits, however, gives this…

2 plays against (4 & 6) and (5 and 7)

…which works because 4 hasn’t previously played against 6, and 5 hasn’t previously played against 7.

At this point I put together a little table to see if anything was missing. The results I have so far are:

The “1” match-ups

1 2 3

1 4 5

1 6 7

The “2” match-ups:

2 4 6

2 5 7

This leaves the “3” match-ups to work out. 3 has already been used with 1 and 2, but has not been used with 4, so I wrote the partial line:

3 4

We need another number to complete the line. 5 comes after 4, but it’s been used with 4 previously. Next comes 6, but that’s also been used with 4 previously. Next is 7, which has no previous use with 4, so the line becomes:

3 4 7

I then went back over all the previous lines to check whether there are any remaining numbers with which 3 had not yet been used. Yes indeed: 5 and 6. This generated the following line:

3 5 6

I don’t know if the forum has a posting length limit, so I’m going to break off here and continue in a second post in a few moments.

The only figure I can quote off the top of my head with complete confidence about its accuracy is the number of A&A games of which I own just a single copy: two titles, specifically Guadalcanal and Zombies. For every other A&A game I own multiple copies, ranging from a low of two copies (in the case of Bulge and of the old Milton Bradley edition) to a high of “I stopped counting when I went over six copies” in the case of 1941. For the past decade or so I’ve typically bought at least three copies of every new A&A game during the week following their initial release (one copy from each of three local hobby shops, in a “support your local merchants” spirit), and I typically take advantage of annual Boxing Day specials to buy myself an extra copy of an in-print A&A game, whose choice varies from year to year; last year, it was 1942 second edition. My favourites of the bunch are the 1940 games, which I always buy in Europe + Pacific pairs: I have three (or is it four?) copies of the first edition, and I have four (or is it three?) copies of the second edition; in retrospect, I wish I had grabbed more copies of the first edition when it was in print because I like its map board better, and because its unique grey-coloured, British-design ANZAC sculpts were replaced by ANZAC-specific designs in the second edition. I’ll also sometimes, as a niche purchase, order online a second-hand copy of an out-of-print A&A game, but I don’t do this very often.

All of this is very much what the military would call “in excess of requirements” from a conventional perspective, but as an A&A sculpt collector I don’t see it quite from the angle of conventional requirements. For one thing, I like the fact that having multiple copies of multiple games, ranging across the publication history of A&A, provides a vast range of variant shapes, colours and shades for the sculpts, with the differences ranging from the trivial (e.g., the hatch shape on the turret of the American Sherman tank) to “so-flagrant-that-it-qualifies-as-a-new-unit” situations (e.g. the two versions of the German 88 AAA gun and the Stuka dive bomber, which actually served [incorrectly] as field artillery and fighter units in the older games). And I’m intrigued by the fact that accumulating so many sculpts produces wildly different frequency-distribution statistics: at one extreme I have huge quantities of US infantry sculpts (which are present in every A&A game ever made), while at the other extreme I only have small numbers of pieces which are unique to certain out-of-print games (like the green and orange generic AAA guns from Guadalcanal).

@Dafyd:

There was discussion on the board last week about Free French and Vichy French forces and a government in exile still collecting income from the colonies.�  I’m not sure that all of Canada should become France-West but I could see Quebec becoming a capitol in exile sight.�  The remainder of Canada would continue as part of the Commonwealth.�

I could – in principle – imagine the French government setting up a wartime government-in-exile in Quebec, though frankly London would make more sense for lots of reasons.  London hosted lots of governments-in-exile during WWII, and some parts of south-east England are conveniently just a few dozen (rather than thousands of ) miles away from France.  I can’t imagine, however, a case in which such an arrangement would cause Quebec (where I happen to live) to switch from being a Canadian province to being some kind of French colonial department.  Just because French is the predominant language of Quebec doesn’t mean that Quebec sees itself as a part of France (believe me, it doesn’t), and just because some Quebecers would like Quebec to leave Canada to form a sovereign country doesn’t meant they want to become an overseas territory of France.  After all, the fact that the Belgian Congo is administered from London in Global 1940 doesn’t mean that England has become a part of Belgium while Scotland continues to be part of the Commonwealth.

A news story about some of the secret behind-the-scenes work (signals intelligence and radio navigation) done by the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the Wrens) during WWII.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/d-day-code-breakers-women-1.5159789

Your response to aardvarkpepper provides some interesting insights into why you’re developing this matrix, and it also raises some new questions. I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped what you’re getting at, but it sounds as if you’re trying to generate a massive amount of evidence in order to make a point by the sheer brute force of quantity. What I’m most unclear about is the nature of the point you’re trying to make by doing this. To put it as a question: are you trying to test your game’s level of balance for your own benefit (possibly because its balance can’t be proved from theoretical considerations alone) or are you trying to prove its balance to someone else who needs to be convinced? If it’s the latter, I doubt that a bunch of statistical data is going to overcome their scepticism. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the original pilot movie for the eventual TV series Voyage to the Bottom of The Sea, but there’s a scene depicting an argument at the U.N. between two scientists, each of whom thinks the other is an idiot. Scientist B produces a stack of calculations which he says proves that he’s correct, puts them on Scientist A’s desk and says he’s welcome to check the figures for himself. Scientist A mumbles for a few seconds, looking at random through the stack of papers, then puts them down in disgust and declares that there’s no point in checking these figures because “I cannot be wrong!” So much for the scientific method.

When I talk about proving fairness (or lack thereof) from theoretical considerations, I’m referring to this sort of thing, quoted from something I remembered from Wikipedia: “Robert Feinerman has shown that the game of dreidel is “unfair”, in that the first player to spin has a better expected outcome than the second player, and the second better than the third, and so on. Feinerman, Robert (1976). “An ancient unfair game”. The American Mathematical Monthly. 83 (8): 623–625.” Or to use a different model, consider the buttered toast phenomenon. If a slice of toast, buttered on one side, were flung energetically into the air a hundred times under perfectly random conditions, it would land buttered-side-down exactly (or almost exactly) 50% of the time. Then why is it that, in real life, buttered toast sliding off a plate tends to land buttered-side-down significantly more often than 50% of the time? Because in real life it involves conditions which are relatively standardized rather than random. The slice of toast typically starts out sitting on plate buttered-side-up being held somewhere between waist height and chest height by a human being roughly five to six feet tall. If the plate is accidentally tilted, the toast slides off and falls with an acceleration of 1G (9.8 m/s squared). Over the distance at which it was dropped, this typically gives the slice of toast enough time to turn over once but not twice – so it hits the floor buttered-side-down. I don’t know if all this has ever been proved empirically, by running hundreds of toast experiments (half of them randomized and half of them standardized), but even if it’s been done the numbers wouldn’t change my mind; the theoretical argument I’ve mentioned sounds convincing in and of itself. In fact, I’d find it much more interesting to read additional theoretical arguments demonstrating that the above model is wrong than to read masses of numerical data demonstrating that the above model is right.

But anyway, I agree that the matrix is, if nothing else, an interesting theoretical exercise in its own right – kind of like solving a “Seven Bridges of Konigsberg” type of problem. I don’t have the mathematical background to crack it, so unfortunately I can’t be of any help with it.

Ah, yes – the Xeno and Table Tactics stuff, and the Enemy on the Horizon expansion. I have a few sets of those items too, though for a number of years they’ve been living in honourable retirement in some of my plastic storage trays of secondary units. They date back to what seems (from today’s perspective) to have been the medieval period of A&A gaming, when the destroyer was still a relatively new unit, and the cruiser didn’t yet exist, and all anti-aircraft artillery units were generic, and the British and the Russians had an awful lot of “foreign” sculpts in their inventories, and the modern unit-colour scheme hadn’t yet emerged and so forth. And, crucially, when the player nations beyond the “big five” (US, UK, RU, GE and JA) didn’t yet have their own sculpts (if they were even player nations at all, which they mostly weren’t), which meant that A&A enthusists had to settle for, let’s say, representing French units with Xeno’s low-sharpness, soft-plastic, baby-blue sculpts. Though I must say that Xeno’s U-boat pen units were a cool concept. Compared with that era, we’re living in an age of sculpt diversity (even if you only count the official A&A ones, to say nothing of HBG’s large product line of combat units) that was almost unimaginable in those days.

Your concept is interesting, eroxors.  I do think that it’s a bit of stretch to assume that Brazil, which achieved independence from its Portuguese colonial rulers in 1821-1823, would “enter the war under the control of the Dutch”, a modest colonial power which had ruled just a few small bits and pieces of Brazil for a mere couple of decades (1630-1654) three hundred years before the Second World War, and whose own national territory had been overrun and occupied by the Nazis in five days.  Brazil dilly-dallied until August 1942 before declaring war on the Axis (as an independent country, not as a nation controlled by someone else), despite the fact that it was in the geographic sphere of influence of the United States – a large, powerful country that wasn’t under Nazi occupation, that was geographically closer to Brazil than Holland, and which did not carry the stigma of having ever been a colonial ruler of any part of Brazil.

One subject you didn’t mention in your posts, and which could be interesting for you to investigate, is ADBACOM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABDACOM).  The Battle of the Java Sea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea) should also interest you, since the ABDA fleet in that engagement was under the command of a Dutch Admiral, Karel Doorman.

@SS-GEN said in On this day during W.W. 2:

Remembering all that died and served on this day in history.

Yes indeed. Towards the end of Cornelius Ryan’s classic D-day book The Longest Day, as Rommel walks into his office and closes the door just as the clock strikes midnight and June 6th becomes June 7th, there’s a sentence which quietly makes the point that the Third Reich had less than a year left to its existence.

The fact that you haven’t said anything specific about how your game works actually makes it easier to discuss it from a broad theoretical perspective. The theoretical issue I’m wondering about at this point relates to what you mentioned here: “The main complaints I’ve gotten are more like, “Bob kept screwing me up because he moves right before I do.” That’s where the idea of only having to play against every opponent once came to mind, in an attempt to lessen some of the luck of the draw that’s involved.”

What I’m wondering is: to what degree are you trying to eliminate (or compensate for) factors which give one player a potential advantage over another? And with all those factors eliminated, what does the game outcome actually end up hinging on? There has to be some way for Player X to gain advantage over Player Y, because otherwise there would be no mechanism for winning the game. I’m not expecting any answers, since your game is confidential; I’m just framing these as questions for you to think about.

Even though nobody wants to play a game that’s unfair, the flip side is that wants to play a game which is so perfectly balanced and utterly fair that it’s dull and pointless. Games are inherently conflictual. Okay, an exception can be made for certain Euro-style games in which the focus is on teamwork rather than winning and losing, and perhaps that’s what you’re designing, but I’m going to assume that we’re talking about conventional adversarial games. Let’s take A&A, and the conflict which inspired it, WWII. In simplistic terms, the Axis powers start out in a position of military strength and economic weakness, while the Allies start out in a position of military weakness and economic strength. Is this situation balanced? Arguably yes, since each side has both strengths and weaknesses. Is the situation symmetrical? Definitely not, because the strengths and weaknesses are different on the two sides. Is it fair? That’s a matter of opinion. Does it make for an interesting game and an interesting historical event? Absolutely yes.

One final observation about turn order, by the way. The quintessential no-luck-involved game, chess, has a turn order: White plays first. Does this mean that chess has a deep structural flaw and is inherently unfair? I don’t think so. There was a Soviet chess grandmaster (I can’t remember his name, so I’ll call him So-and-so) who was once asked if he preferred playing White or Black. He answered, “It doesn’t matter to me. If I play White, I win because I play first. If I play Black, I win because I am So-and-so.” Blaming one’s defeat on turn order alone is simplistic, unless the game is so badly designed that turn order inherently gives one side such a clear advantage. In such a case, the bias will be obvious without having to play dozens of game to verify its existence.

@LHoffman said in Customizers: which A&A games do you own?:

So what is everyone’s rationale for owning multiple copies, or many multiple copies, of the same game. If it is just for collecting purposes, then I suppose that rationale isn’t necessary. But otherwise is it to get pieces, for game value if/when they go out of print, spares, lending them out to others, hosting game parties or tournaments where multiple copies are needed…?

I have various reasons for owning multiple copies, but they all relate to the fact that the sculpts are the feature of the A&A games that I’ve always liked the most (with the maps coming in second place, and the actual game mechanics only coming in third place). I think I once mentioned this in an older thread, but what makes the sculpt / map combination so interesting to me is that it reminds me of the 1970s-era movie Midway, which features two map tables (a huge one in Nimitz’s headquarters in Hawaii and a smaller one on Yamamoto’s flagship), on which some suitably-shaped blocks representing planes and ships are used by both sides to plot the movements of the opposing forces as the operation progresses, as if they’re playing some kind of intricate game of chance and skill. It’s no surprise that the large Global 1940 map has turned out to be my favourite one, and I once used it and my sculpts to recreate the Midway operation (just as a map exercise, not as a game).

But anyway, I’ve always liked the idea of having a sculpt collection that’s large and diverse (both in terms of unit shapes and sculpt colours), because it offers more opportunity to depict WWII military situations on a map. Those opportunities were limited in the old days, when the number of player nations and unit types was small, but now the numbers and the diversity in my collection are large enough to allow some sculpts to be used in ways which go beyond their original purpose. For example: now that I own the second version of the Panther tank (the one introduced in Bulge, I think) in large enough numbers to fulfil every possible application as the standard German medium tank, I can reallocate the first version of the Panther to the role of a Jagdpanther tank destroyer. Ditto with the old small-scale version of the German 88mm FLAK gun: the new big version is actually used in Global 1940 as an AAA gun (which is what it was originally designed for in real life), so I can reallocate the old small version to serve as an 88mm anti-tank gun (an adaptation that actually was done with the 88mm, when the Germans discovered that this anti-aircraft gun was also a superb tank-killer). I’ve supplied China with the old lime-green British equipment pieces from (if I recall correctly) the Revised edition, to make up for the fact that China in Anniversary and Global only has infantry units; the greens don’t quite match, but they’re close enough. I have a tray (I keep all my sculpts in plastic trays) in which I’ve put all of my cherry-red Japanese pieces from the old Pacific game, and I’ve labeled it “Axis Minors” (to stand for Bulgaria and Hungary and so forth), and I have a similar Allied Minors tray in which I’ve put all the old purple Soviet pieces. I have two trays of “ANZAC grey” units: the ANZAC-patterned ones from the second edition of Pacific 1940, and the British-patterned ones from the first edition (with some AAA units borrowed from the second edition game); I’ve labeled the ANZAC-patterned one “Southern Commonwealth Dominions: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa” and I’ve labeled the British-patterned one “Northern Commonwealth Dominions: Canada, Newfoundland, Eire”. And so forth, just for the fun of it.

I have no idea why the map designates Sierra Leone as a neutral.  It was British-controlled at the time: Freetown (where there was indeed a naval base during WWII) had the status of a British crown colony, while the rets of the country was a British protectorate.  So this element of the map is indeed puzzling.  Mind you, this is the same map which implies (by land colour and roundel) that Mexico, Central America and the West Indies are all part of the United States…so it’s hardly a model of geopolitical rectitude.

An argument could be made, by the way, that Sierra Leone’s game map neighbor Liberia ought to be a pro-Allied neutral.  The US and Liberia were on very close terms during WWII: American troops served there, a lot of servicemen transited through it, and it was an important supplier of rubber at a time when Japan controlled many other sources for this material.  In practical terms, however, this change wouldn’t affect very much because Liberia has no IPCs and no standing army.

@SS-GEN said in On this day during W.W. 2:

It’s funny how a missile was made to look like a plane. Needed the wings for guidance.
Just think if they had that weapon at start of war in 39. Who knows with that they would of had the jump on allies maybe for a couple of years. But that’s a but and the allies may have countered it early too just like they did in 44 45.

The reason V1 had wings (in contrast with the finned V2) wasn’t really a matter of guidance, it was a matter of how much energy it takes to move a mass of x kilograms over a distance of y kilometers (in this case, from France to London) at a speed of z kilometers per hour. The purpose of the V1’s wings, like those of a conventional aircraft, was to provide lift and thus give the V1 the ability to fly in a conventional manner on a more or less horizontal flight path. The V1, which weighed two tons, could get from point A to point B at 640 kph, on a relatively modest amount of fuel. The V2, by contrast, weighed six times more and travelled nine times faster; it followed a ballistic trajectory rather than a horizontal flight path, which is why it didn’t need wings. The trade-off, however, was a ballistic missile requires much greater thrust than an aircraft, which in turn requires larger quantities of more energetic fuel. Also note that rockets like the V2 need to carry their own fuel oxidizer, whereas air-breathing jet aircraft like the V1 don’t, which is another reason why jets can sustain themselves in flight on a relatively modest fuel load.

The question of whether the V1 and the V2 could have altered the outcome of WWII if they’d been developed, let’s say, about five years earlier is an interesting one; my impression is that, in and of themselves, they would not have done so, even if they’d been deployed in much larger quantities. The V1 and V2 were basically an expensive and inefficient alternate way (in terms of their bang-for-the-buck ratio) of bombing a city with low precision, so in that respect Germany would have been better off developing a proper heavy bomber design and a proper long-range escort fighter and producing both in large quantities. The only unquestioned advantage which the V2 had over any conventional bomber, or the V2, was that it was impossible for the defenders to intercept it once it was launched. Which brings me back to the “in and of themselves” point I mentioned earlier: the V2 by itself was not a weapon which could have changed the outcome of WWII, but if it had been equiped with an atomic warhead it would have been a serious strategic threat to the Allies. But even here, we have to be careful about jumping to conclusions. First, the German atomic program was years behind that of the US – and even the US, which devoted huge resources to the Manhattan Project, only produced (and detonated) three bombs (one was a test device) by the summer of 1945 (by which time Germany had already surrendered). So even if we were to assume (and it’s a big assumption) that Germany could have matched the Manhattan Project, and even done better by assembling its bombs a year earlier than the Americans did, the question becomes: would the Allies have surrendered if, let’s say, London and Moscow had each been nuked in mid-1944 by a V2 with a kiloton-level atomic warhead? The Russians, who’d already lost tens of millions of people and who’d seen huge areas of their countries devastated by conventional warfare, would certainly have kept going, and would probably have been even more determined than before to take their revenge against Nazi Germany. The Americans would also have kept going, with an even greater conviction than before that Nazi Germany was enormously dangerous and had to be stopped by any means possible. And my guess is that even the British would have kept going: they would have known from their intelligence sources that Germany had used up its tiny supply of warheads and they would have known that by that date the momentum of the war was on the Allied side. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine what the practical details of a British surrender would have looked like in mid-1944, given that up until D-Day Britain was basically the operational base of a gigantic American army which, presumably, would not have meekly gone back home if Churchill – in a completely out-of-character move – would have told Eisenhower, “Thanks, but we don’t need you anymore.”

In A&A, players know in advance who will play which power, and they know in advance which power gets to play in what order. They know in advance who will play which power because, prior to the start of the game, they’ll have come to an agreement about it – either by a random draw, or by mutual agreement, or whatever. And they know in advance which power gets to play in what order because the turn order is prescribed in the rulebook:

1. Germany
2. Soviet Union
3. Japan
4. United States
5. China
6. United Kingdom
7. Italy
8. ANZAC
9. France

In your game, it sounds as if one or both of those elements have been discarded. It sounds as though the five colours don’t play in a predetermined order, and it sounds as though the players don’t get to choose which colour they play. Rather, it sounds as if these things are determined either by the game system, or by the actions of one or more players, or both. To use the analogy of a five-part train consisting of a locomotive and three passenger cars and a caboose, it sounds as if the game starts with somebody somehow being assigned to the driving the locomotive (and therefore getting to play first). The results of that person’s first-player actions then determine who gets assigned to the first passenger car (and therefore getting to play second). And so on, until the last remaining person ends up being put into the caboose. And it sounds as if one of your playtesters is complaining about being stuck in the caboose, a problem which you’re wondering could be remedied by changing the configuration of the caboose to make it more comfortable. At least that’s how I’m interpreting your (understandably) cryptic remark that turn order determines what colour/nation you get. I say “understandably cryptic” because I realize you want to keep the details secret, which is fair enough and which is why I don’t think I’ll have any further questions on the subject. Good luck with your project.

Your best option might be to use a simple graphics program like Paint to create either a single large picture or several smaller pictures (depending on whether or not you’ll need to make multiple printouts) consisting of the required interprovincial borderlines and the required names on a clear background. Print out draft versions on plain paper as you experiment with the pictures until you get the sizes and positions exactly right to fit on your map board. Once you’re satisfied, take the files to a local printing/photocopy place and ask them to print the picture (or pictures) on sheets of thin clear acrylic, i.e. the type used for old-fashioned overhead projector transparencies. These can be overlayed on your map and held in place by transparent sticky tape. It should look fairly professional, and it won’t affect the actual map so you can always change it back later if you wish.

@seancb:

And maybe, just maybe, if a player needed a little help from a higher power to hold off an invasion or attack or reinforcement, a storm may just be the answer!!!

It could, of course, also work in the opposite direction: a player who’s already in trouble could have the final nails driven into his coffin by a bad weather dice roll, which at best would probably generate a lot of cursing on his part and at worst might lead him to pledge that he’ll never use the weather house rule again.  Particularly if the weather house rule revolves around huge storm-of-the-century meteorological events that produce severe damage over large parts of the game map.

If the proposed system is indeed based on the concept that there’s only a 1-in-36 chance of a weather event happening (and I must admit that this element escaped me, given the rather lengthy and – to me at least – complex formulation of the house rule), then my suggestion would be to speed up and simplify the application of the rule as follows:

• Step 1: At the beginning of a round, a 2-dice roll takes place to determine if a weather event will affect the round.  If the outcome is a double 6 (for which there is 1 chance out of 36), then a weather event will occur and the players then procede to Step 2.  For any other outcome (for which there are 35 chances out of 36), then no weather effect will occur and the players continue to play normally.

COMMENT: The point of Step 1 is to reduce the work involved (in both reading and applying the rule) to an absolute minimum by eliminating from it everything except the 1-in-36-chance that a weather event will occur.  After all, if the chances of such an event are almost zero, then why should the players need to concern themselves in Step 1 with any other details about the weather house rule?  [The only other element I’d add to Step 1 would be a simple system to determine who rolls the weather dice.  Suggestion: use two distinctly-coloured weather dice and initially give them to the player who plays first in the turn order; he gets to make the weather roll for the first round; once that’s done, he gives the weather dice to the second player in the turn order, who will make the weather roll for the second round, and so forth.]

• Step 2 (used only if Step 1 has produced a double 6): Use a simple table-and-dice-roll combination to determine what kind of weather event has had what kind of effect on what players in which location.  The result is then applied.  No other steps are involved.

COMMENT: I deliberately provided no details in Step 2, in order to keep it purely conceptual.  My general suggestion for the table, however, would be to follow three principles:

a) The effects of bad weather should almost always be minimal, or to put it another way, “annoying but minor.”  There should be almost no chance of bad weather producing an effect so severe that it will have major effects (good or bad) on a player’s situation.

b) Bad weather should usually have a negative effect on both sides if it occurs in an area where both sides are present.  As I said previously, bad weather tends to make everyone miserable in a combat zone, regardless of which side they’re on.  Admittedly, there were some situations in WWII in which bad weather favoured one side in a zone of operations, but when this happened it was partly because of additional factors that were non-meteorological in nature (for instance, because the Germans were convinced that Barbarossa would be completed before any winter clothing for the troops would be needed).

c) The results of bad weather should be quick and easy to apply, ideally in a single step.  For example: at sea, the effects of bad weather would be easier to apply if they simply involved a small number of immediate ship sinkings (meaning they’d be applied at once, and then they’d be done with) than if they involved combat modifiers that would affect every round of combat (in which case they’d be a protracted headache).

As a follow-up to the original post, by the way, it’s not surprising that the bomb went off spontaneously (which is what the news story seems to indicate). Explosives can become unstable over time, which is one reason why certain types of souvenirs sometimes kept by veterans are potentially dangerous. I read a news story a few years ago about a woman who was going through the personal possessions of her father (a WWII vet) after he passed away, and who found an unexploded hand grenade in one of his desk drawers. She very sensibly called the police.