Posts made by CWO Marc

@cannon:

I need pictures of the setup!

Here’s what it looks like:

I’m curious about the map shown in the pictures.  Is it some kind of customized game board?

CWO Marc

The setup I use for handling extra-large game boards (like the one for The War Game: World War II) is to place several card tables (the kind with legs that fold for storage) end-to-end.

I find that card tables work well because they’re inexpensive to buy, they give you the option of getting as many or as few as you need, and they’re usable regardless of whether or not you have space to devote to a full-time gaming area.  If you’re short on space, you can set them up temporarily for a game then fold them and put them away when you’re done.  If on the other hand you have enough room to leave them set up long-term, the space under the row of folding tables can conveniently serve double-duty as storage space for your game equipment.  That’s where I keep the plastic tackle boxes in which I store my A&A sculpts.

Depending on how smooth the combined surface of the table-tops is, you might want to put something stiff in between the tables and the game board to provide a more level surface (which can be helpful when the game board is in several pieces). Foamcore posterboard is one option; another is a material called (I think) coroplast – basically it’s structured like heavy cardboard, but it’s made out of plastic.  I buy mine at a store that sells artists’ supplies.

CWO Marc

@bbrett3:

@idk_iam_swiss:

Wonder what color Anzac is going to be…

Probably close enough to the British tan that they’re not interchangeable, but close enough that you’ll get them mixed up quite often (ex. Italy: Brown  Russia: Brown with some red bits)

From a September 6 post by Krieghund in the Pictures of Pacific 1940 Box Art thread:

“They will be the same sculpts as the UK in a different shade of tan.”

CWO Marc

@Omega:

although history books say that we gained our independence from UK during WWI

The Statute of Westminster of 1931 was the instrument which gave legislative independence to Canada and the five other Dominions which existed at the time.

CWO Marc

@Krieghund:

By the way, the Australian forces aren’t simply being renamed.  ANZAC is a separate, playable power.

Do you know to what extent (if any) the ANZAC forces will have different sculpts than the British pieces, and/or if they’ll be differentiated by color from the (I assume) beige-colored British units?

CWO Marc

@Brain:

Is CaptRick the designer of the game?

Yes.

CWO Marc

I spent some time comparing the pieces in the new game to the previous ones.  Apart from the completely new Russian naval pieces, there are a few minor differences with a few units – in some cases visible at a glance, in others so small that you have to squint really hard to see them.

Among the more visible changes:

• the Japanese artillery piece has an identical body to previous ones but the legs of the undercarriage are extended rather than folded together

• the German cruiser piece has an identical superstructure to the one in Anniversary but its hull is more slender and the stern is pointed rather than straight

Among the less visible changes:

• The American / British destroyer now has a gap in between the bridge structure and the first funnel

• The British aircraft carrier no longer has a catapult on the forward part of the deck

Among the almost-invisible changes:

• Some of the ships (like the American battleship and the German transport) have features (like the battleship main guns) which are defined a little more sharply than before, and seem to be smoother and more glossy than previously

• There are very small differences in some of the fine details on some of the tanks and aircraft

• Most of the infantry pieces are a bit taller; the most visible of the infantry changes is the different size of the submachine gun magazine on the Russian piece

Basically, what this adds up to is that most of the units are virtually identical to the previous ones, with just a few totally new pieces introduced and just a couple of partially-revised sculpts whose revisions are significant enough that you can tell the difference at arm’s length distance.

CWO Marc

@coachofmany:

Anybody know where we can get some Minor factories for the AAA games, so they look smaller than the ones that come stock in the game?

The factories which comes on the piece trees produced by Xeno Games (http://www.xenogames.com/extraparts.php) are smaller than the AAA ones and have a different design, so they’re easy to distinguish.  They come in several colors.  They’re made of lower-grade plastic than what’s used for the AAA factory pieces, and I think that some of the colors don’t look particularly good (too gaudy or too translucent for my taste).

The War Game: World War II comes with two sizes of factories, made of good-quality plastic, but as I recall even the small ones are bigger than the AAA ones.

I checked the Plastics For Games website (http://www.plasticsforgames.co.uk/en/en_prod_directory.asp) to see if they had anything which looked like a factory, but the closest thing I found were little Monopoly-like houses.  If you’re willing to settle for a very generic shape, they sell a “RECTANGULAR BLOCK Cored 11mm Sq x 18”, which is available in a variety of colors.  The price quoted is 20 pounds for a pack of 1,000.

CWO Marc

@Black:

Perhaps additional ways to help identify technology pieces would be to make them a darker or lighter shade of color of the country they belong to

Different shades of the same colour aren’t always easy to tell apart under all lighting conditions (daylight / incandescent lights / fluorescent lights).

CWO Marc

@Upside-down_Turtle:

I’m also wondering what the three “Special Surprise” pieces will be, each nation getting 3 of them.  Man, I really hope they are A-bombs.

The Sushi Jalapeno War, produced by Xeno Games, comes with some pretty good nuclear mushroom clouds:

http://boardgamegeek.com/image/108844?size=large

CWO Marc

Great looking board.  Perhaps this thread should actually be under “Other Axis & Allies Variants”, where I’d have noticed it sooner.

CWO Marc

@swordsman3003:

Such an undertaking obviously requires a completely new map, so on and so forth.

It depends on just how different an alternate history you’re talking about.  If you’re thinking of a Second World War alternate-history scenario which starts roughly at the same point as the real war but then goes off in a different direction, you could use the board which comes with The War Game: World War II.  Unlike the A&A global games, or A&A Europe, it does not show Western Europe and parts of the USSR already under German occupation, so it gives you a more neutral starting point.

CWO Marc

Also on the subject of Italian POWs: some Italians captured by the British in North Africa ended up being interned in the Orkney Islands, where they were put to work constructing concrete barriers to seal off the eastern entry route into Scapa Flow (the route taken by U47 when it torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak in October 1939).  Sometimes, arguments would break out between the Italians and the British personnel supervising the work, and an Army interpreter would be called in to sort out the dispute.  After one such altercation, a Navy officer took the interpreter aside and asked him why he had been translating for the Italian man who’d been complaining, saying that, “This fellow can speak English!”  The interpreter retorted that the man couldn’t “even speak Italian!” – an answer which no doubt baffled the Navy officer until the prisoner later confided that he’d been speaking in dialect.  (“Churchill’s Prisoners: The Italians In Orkney, 1942-1944.” St Margaret’s Hope : Orkney Wireless Museum, 1992.)

CWO Marc

@MadMc:

When Hitler was told that Brazil was leaning to the Allies camp, he remarked “Brazil will join the Allies when snakes smoke ciggarettes” When the Brazillian Expeditionary Force began fighting in Italy, they wore a shoulder patch showing a snake smoking

Here’s a similar story about Hermann Göring, courtesy of Wikipedia:

On 9 August 1939, Göring boasted “The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring: you can call me Meier!” (“I want to be called Meier if …” is a German idiom to express that something is impossible. Meier (in several spelling variants) is the second most common surname in Germany.) By the end of the war, Berlin’s air raid sirens were bitterly known to the city’s residents as “Meier’s trumpets”, or “Meier’s hunting horns.”

CWO Marc

Another good mutual-insult exchange (though this one wasn’t face to face) was the one between MacArthur and Eisenhower.  Ike had served on MacArthur’s staff prior to the Second World War, and there was clearly no love lost between the two men.  Eisenhower later said that he had studied drama under MacArthur for seven years, and MacArthur said that Ike was the best clerk he had ever had.

CWO Marc

And here are two more amusing stories connected to the Atlantic Charter conference.  Roosevelt travelled to the rendezvous site (Placentia Bay, Newfoundland) aboard the cruiser USS Augusta.  At one point along the way, the cruiser was getting ready to deploy its paravanes, an operation involving a lot of dangerous steel cables.  An officer stood on deck supervising the preparations, making sure that everything was properly set up and that everyone was in a safe place before the paravanes were released.  He was just about to blow into a whistle to give the release signal when Fala, Roosevelt’s famous terrier, appeared on deck and walked right into the middle of the paravane cables.  The horrified officer quickly dropped the whistle from his mouth – if he’d blown into it, Roosevelt’s dog would have been torn to pieces – and told somebody remove Fala from the scene.  From that day onward, Roosevelt’s staff was put under strict orders to keep Fala on a leash whenever the Presidential pooch went for a walk around the ship.

When the Augusta met the Prince of Wales and its three escorting destroyers in Newfoundland, a young lieutenant from the Augusta was put in charge of a group of sailors and given the task of transporting to the other ships around 2,000 cardboard gift boxes which had been prepared at Roosevelt’s instructions.  Each box contained cheese, fruit, a carton of American cigarettes and a card from the President expressing his best wishes to the officers and crew of the Royal Navy ships.  The young lieutenant had the boxes piled into one of the Augusta’s boats, then he and his men set off for the Prince of Wales.  They were received very gratefully by the British sailors, who had been operating on rather tight food rations (but who, unlike American sailors, had access to alcohol aboard ship).  The British officers rushed the American lieutenant to the wardroom, where they gave him a glass of gin, while his enlisted men were taken below deck by the British sailors and given a ration of grog.  The Americans then got back into their boat and delivered the remaining gift boxes to the British battleship’s three accompanying destroyers – where in each case they received the same kind of high-proof welcome they’d gotten on the Prince of Wales.  The whole group was pretty well sloshed by the time they got back to the Augusta.

CWO Marc

@Adlertag:

So, are we running out of funny stories, or what ?

Here’s another one.  In early August 1941, Churchill, various members of his staff and a number of officers were on a train heading to northern Scotland, where they would embark on the battleship Prince of Wales to cross the Atlantic to meet Roosevelt for the Atlantic Charter conference.  After an excellent meal aboard the train (Churchill not being particularly finicky about observing wartime food rationing regulations), the Prime Minister asked his scientific advisor Professor Lindemann to figure out how much champagne he had consumed during his adult life at the rate of around one pint per day.  Lindemann took out his slide rule and did a few computations, then announced the answer.  Churchill, very pleased with the impressive-sounding figure, then asked Lindemann to calculate how many trains would be required to carry that much champagne.  To Churchill’s disappointment, the answer he received to that question was that one-half of the train car in which they were sitting would be quite sufficient.  (Someone then jokingly asked Lindemann to determine how many yards of cigars Churchill had smoked over a lifetime, but “The Prof”, as he was known, declined to make the attempt.)

CWO Marc

I can’t recall where I heard this story, so I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it sounds in character with Montgomery.  Sometime after his promotion to the rank of Field Marshall, Monty was in a military car being driven through the British countryside to an appointment of some sort.  He noticed a little boy walking along the side of the road, told his driver to stop and offered to give the boy a lift.  After the boy got in and the car got underway, Monty asked the boy if he knew who he was.  The boy said no.  Monty said, “Let me give you a hint… I’m a Field Marshall.”  The little boy said, “My father works in the field too – he’s a farmer.”  The boy then asked the rather deflated Montgomery, “What does a Field Marshall do?” Monty answered, “Well, I kill people.”  The astonished boy said, “Do you really?”  “Yes,” said Montgomery."  “How many people have you killed?”  asked the boy.  “Oh, thousands,” Monty said cheerfully.  The little boy said, “Oh.”  Then after a moment he added, “May I please get out now?”

CWO Marc

@Corbeau:

Canada, Québec, Montréal for me, seems I’m not alone.

I’m also in Montreal.

CWO Marc