Not all of these compositions have actual lyrics, but here are some WWII (or WWII-appropriate) musical pieces that you might enjoy:
Marche Lorraine (composed by Louis Ganne)
Prussia’s Glory (composed by Johann Gottfried Piefke)
Katyusha (composed by Matvey Blanter)
The Sacred War (music by Aleksandr Aleksandrov; lyrics are by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach)
An additional source would be to go in the opposite direction from new movies: by looking for WWII films (dramas, documentaries, propaganda films, newsreels) which were actually produced during the war. A lot of this stuff is now in public domain; some of it can be found for free on sites like YouTube, or purchased on DVD at a low cost. There are companies like Mill Creek Entertainment which sell multi-disc (24, 50, 100 disc) packages which add up to dozens of hours of viewing time; a good one from Mill Creek is the 24-disc pack America: Stories of War, which covers several wars (including WWII and Korea). Many of these WWII films are shorts, so they’d fit nicely into the A&A time intervals in between an individual player’s game turns, and some of them are in colour. Three examples of the kind of movie I’m talking about are: The Fighting Lady (1944), The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), and With the Marines at Tarawa (1944); I especially like The Fighting Lady, which is about carrier warfare and which will appeal both to the naval and aviation enthusiasts in your group.
Very nice work! Thanks for sharing this picture of your new table.
@AdmScuttlebutt said in Introduce or Re-Introduce Yourself (Jan. 2019):
Attention on deck mates! Just wanted to check in. It’s been a month since joining this thread and I am supplied up and ready to go on cruise. I have purchased A&A Europe 1940 2nd ed and Pacific. As well as A&A 1914. I added Leaders from HSMG and some Facist Italian roundels. I am learning how to play from Young Grasshopper, General Hand Grenade, and Jonathon Meyer. Ready to try some of the 1914 strategies using my own live dice rolls! Let you know how it goes next month. AdmlScuttlebutt out! Fair winds and following seas to each of you! And thanks for the helping hand mates.
It’s always good to see a fellow naval enthusiast joining the forum. Welcome aboard!
Congratulations and best wishes! A fitting way for you to celebrate would be for you to play a game of A&A Anniversary edition with your local group. :)
My pleasure. By the way, I wrote “acrylic” above but I’ve double-checked and the correct term is actually acetate sheets, a.k.a. projector transparencies; see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(projection).
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.
@Wittmann said in On this day during W.W. 2:
@CWO-Marc How funny: I thought it was really sad!
I guess the perspective depends on which side of a Stuka attack a person is on: delivery or receipt. :)
I love the picture of the crashed Stuka because it’s pitched forward at an angle that makes it look exactly like an airborne Stuka that’s diving for an attack.
@IshidO said in Fun Awards suggetions plz:
Thank you for your great ideas! The only problem I see is, that the people need to share this traveling trophy thingy (3 guys if the allies win) and additionaly they won’t fight on the same side in the next year, which makes it even more complicated
I think you have two basic options for addressing this issue, and you could even use them in some sort of combination with each other. Option one is for every member of a winning team to get an individual baton, which they would get to keep until the outcome of their next game (regardless of which side they play) determines whether they get to keep it. This is roughly what happens with military unit citations: every member of the unit receives an individual decoration, in addition to the unit as a whole having the honour noted in its record. Option two (which can be used in conjunction with option one, rather than instead of it) would be for a single trophy to be awarded to the winning team, each of whose members would keep it for part of the time until the next game. This roughly the equivalent of what’s done with the Stanley Cup: there’s only one Stanley Cup, but I think that each team member gets to take it to his home town for a victory parade. The team trophy could perhaps be a flag rather than a field marshall’s baton; in fact, I think that some military unit citations include the element of a flag being added to the unit’s regimental (or whatever) colours. Batons, by contrast, are carried by individuals, so they’re more suitable for the Option one component.
Given that your players are a mixed group with different levels of experience at various other A&A games, I think your best option would be a two-part strategy: start with Anniversary, play a few games to get everyone up to speed, then make the jump to Global. In terms of size and complexity, Anniversary is nicely positioned between the 1942 game and the Global 1940 game, so it’s a good tool for transitioning from the former to the latter. Jumping straight into the deep end of the pool might be less comfortable for the less-experienced players in the group; ideally, you want to set up a situation where the whole gang gets into Global with more or less the same level of skill and enthusiasm, so that nobody feels like an odd man out.
You could probably sell it for a few dollars locally (i.e. sell it in a way that doesn’t involve shipping costs), as Taamvan suggests, but I doubt that there would be much interest in an out-of-town sale, given that the game is missing some of its original pieces. A&A 1941 is still in print, and is the cheapest of the A&A games on the market, so when you factor in the shipping costs a potential out-of-town buyer could probably find a brand-new copy for about the same price. DoManMacgee’s donation idea is a good one; youngsters who’ve never played A&A won’t be bothered by the replacement sculpts, and as DoManMacgee said this would foster the next generation’s interest in the game. My own preference would be in line with Midnight Reaper’s suggestion to cannibalize the game for its sculpts, which are unique to the 1941 version of the game. I own multiple copies of 1941 for exactly that reason. The American P-40 Warhawk gives you exactly the right fighter to use for China’s Flying Tiger unit in the 1940 game; the British naval transport and the Soviet carrier correct the 1940 game’s lack of nation-specific sculpts for those units; and the battlecruisers (British and Japanese) and heavy tanks (Russian and German) provide good opportunites for house-ruled special units in the 1940, 1942 and Anniversary games.
@taamvan said in Fun Awards suggetions plz:
You could make a “traveling trophy” (we used a participation medal I won in a 5K) that stays with the winner of the most recent game and must, like a wrestling belt, be defended or forfeit upon each new contest.
Good idea. In the context of A&A, one ida for a suitable trophy would be a field marshall’s baton. Rommell had two of them: the large, heavy and gaudy official one which was presented to him when he was promoted, and smaller, lighter, more practical “informal” one which he carried around when he was traveling on business. I think Cornelius Ryan’s book The Longest Day mentions Rommell using the informal baton to point to things on the coastline of France on one occasion when he was inspecting beach defenses.
I don’t have any useful thoughts to offer on the specific problem you describe – but your request for a good Commissar to handle the strategic menace to Moscow reminds me of an old thread in which a player had argued that Russia should abandon the East to Japan and concentrate all of its forces on a defense of the capital, to which I jokingly responded that this strategy had been advocated by an obscure Soviet general named Youstayin Moskowvich Izgudenof. :)
@Midnight_Reaper said in A List of "Games" that are Axis & Allies Expansions in Disguise:
Thanks for enlightening me. My question to you is: if I list Engage the game, and its four expansions, should I list the A&A 2010 expansion pieces on top of that? What do you think?
It’s essentially the same question that applies to some of TT’s earlier sculpts which (as you indicated in an earlier post) served double-duty: TT used them as A&A expansion pieces and as the components of games with non A&A-titles. There’s no inherently correct way to enter / describe this situation in a list; it depends entirely on the conceptual framework for your list, and the framework is whatever you decide it to be. If your list is title-based, the pieces should probably be entered twice: once as six separately-purchasable sets (AM, BR, RU, GE, JA, IT) of A&A 2010 expansions, and once as the “Engage” game. As a sculpt collector, my own view of TT’s products takes the different approach of focusing on the sculpts themselves (design and colour); from that perspective, a Sculpt X that was issued as part of an A&A expansion set (all of which I own) and an identical Sculpt X that was issued in a non-AA-titled game like Cromwell 2026 or Risk 2042 or Engage (none of which I own) work out to be the same thing, and I’d throw them all into the same compartment of my TT storage tray without differentiating between their point of origin.
Thanks; in other words, the None setting causes the oval graphic to serve the same function as the blue “Home” textual link that appears just below it on every page except the forum’s home page. I habitually use that textual link when I want to return to the forum’s home page, so I’ll keep doing that to go there and henceforth I’ll use the little home graphic to go to the site’s home page. Much appreciation for the clarifications.
@Panther said in The new forum has been a lot of work and it's not done yet:
(“None” is for the forum’s main page by default).
For directly accessing the axisandallies.org homepage we have this icon/button to be found in the toolbar to the right of the graphic:
Thanks for the info. I’ve changed the Homepage setting to None, as you suggested, and I got a confirmation that the setting was successfully saved, and indeed it remains as “None” when I sign out and sign back in. The oval graphic, however, still keeps taking me to https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/. The little home icon you mentioned, however, does take me to https://www.axisandallies.org/, so I’ll use that to access the homepage; thanks for letting me know about that option.
I’ve just noticed that the oval “Axis&Allies.org” graphic at the top left corner of the forum page doesn’t lead (as it used to on our old platform) to the www.axisandallies.org main site page; it simply leads back to the forum page itself (https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/), i.e. clicking on it from the forum doesn’t actually take you anywhere else. I assume this is just a migration error that needs to be tweaked.
More info: if you search “table tactics axis allies 2010” on Google you’ll find (see the attached picture) four of the six sets identified as Axis and Allies 2010. And if you google “table tactics new products release axisandallies.org”, you’ll get links to several useful forum threads, including this one…
…which includes pictures.
@Midnight_Reaper said in A List of "Games" that are Axis & Allies Expansions in Disguise:
So, I listed the Americans, Germans, Japanese, and Russians as expansions to Engage, which comes with the British and Italians in the box. I was unaware of those units being sold separately from the main Engage game. I can certainly add those as options, thanks for letting me know. (Of course, now I want to know more about the timeline from the making of those units to the making of the game of Engage.)
-Midnight_Reaper
As a bit of extra background information, I’ve copied below part of a message I received from a forum member back in October 2014, when this topic was being discussed. I had previously sent him an email about the older TT sculpts, and then I commented as follows about the new ones: “I bought one sprue of each type as an experiment and never ordered any more because I was so disappointed in the product. Major variations in sculpt sizes, extra-thick sprues that were very hard to cut, large discoloured patches left on each piece once it had been cut away – so many problems, in fact, that I never bothered detaching most of the pieces. Very disappointing, so I’m doubly glad that we have HBG producing much better units than these later TT ones.” He responded:
Sent to: CWO Marc
Unfortunately they're only in MB Classic colors but there are tons of them. As for those pieces for Engage! I could care less I thought those were too big and I never really cared for them.
I honestly have a small place in my heart for those old TT units it just seems to have been bad timing for the TT team. I sadly heard that the owner made a mistake when sizing the sculpts for the game Engage! His intent, so I've heard, was that they were to be compatible with A&A, and the game Engage! was pretty much just trying to make the best of a bad situation.
The other story I heard is that the last of the TT stock was dumped onto the market as TT was done with the sculpt business. I know Coach has TT pieces in stock on the German HBG site but many of them are now no longer available.