Posts made by Der Kuenstler

@JHendrix112 Hi Justin - Unfortunately I deleted all of my videos a few years ago after seeing some hurtful criticism on Youtube. I now regret doing that, as I realize now far more people have enjoyed the videos than disliked them. Thank you for the kind feedback. On a good note, a some of my subjects can be found in these forums in written form.

@Hopper1999 Thank you, Hopper - I enjoyed reading your post, and feel more fulfilled knowing you got some good out of my past efforts!

@dazzaman77 Thanks for your kind words! I’m glad you got something out of the videos, and they were an inspiration for you! I admit that if something - even a wargame - can help someone through a difficult stage in life, then there is merit to it. I’m encouraged my videos and game adaptations have helped some people - thank you for reminding me, friend!

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/37321/der-kuenstler/6

Hey all - I feel like I owe those who liked my channel and supported it the reasons why I stopped it - here they are and I apologize for abruptly leaving without communication.

There’s no one reason, so here goes:

1. My contractors that I hired to make the new War room did a sloppy job. They did many things that I didn’t notice until after I paid them. For example - none of the walls they put in are even square - my bathroom East wall is over an inch wider than the West wall. The doors they put in had no latches and when I put the latches in none of them would latch because the doors weren’t hung square. My windows still leak. Within two months the new toilet froze and busted, even though I drained most of it beforehand. This made me feel like a big fool and demotivated me to finish it.

I realized that I actually had an ideal setup in my old house, having the War Room in the basement. It had a poured foundation so no water leaks and stayed temperature controlled year round for free, because it was part of the house. This new room I have is in a outside metal building with no heat or air, and the expense of paying for all of that, plus paying to keep the room relatively warm/cool for only a once a month event seemed excessive. A consistent low humidity also is a factor when you have paper products associated with the game and wall posters that can take damage, which requires consistent heating/cooling.

2. My overly ambitious new map/rules project eventually swamped me. Making land and water in Photoshop is pretty easy. Filling in and naming hundreds of territories that each have their own terrain and weather, plus adding all the other improvements I wanted - without even knowing if they would be fun and balanced until tested and retested - is hard. Especially doing it without overcomplicating it. They say a genius is someone who can take something complicated and make it simple. I think I realized I’m no genius.

None of the guys in my play group even wanted a new map anyway - they just responded with blank looks when I told them I was making one. Remember, I hosted a monthly game night for 6 1/2 years. That’s almost 80 game sessions. Been there, done that. So if I wasn’t going to come up with something bigger/better, I had no interest in taking on all the work/expense of making a whole other room to do the exact same thing on the same old map I was bored with.

3. I respond poorly to criticism. I’m a perfectionist and very hard on myself already. I was getting youtube comments to watch my vids on fast speed because I talked too slow. I also had criticism that I couldn’t even pronounce Axis and Allies correctly, so how could my ideas be taken seriously? Despite my getting 20 good comments to one bad one, I still let the bad ones rankle me. So I started thinking, why am I doing all this just to get myself upset? Because I’m actually an introvert, I can’t talk fast and on the fly like other successful youtubers can, so I felt I should just back off and leave it to them.

4. This year I turned 60 years old. I realized I’m now in the fourth quarter of my life. This is a time when a man starts thinking of his legacy. What do I want to be remembered for? Do I want to be remembered as just as a guy obsessed with a game? Not just a game, but a game with the theme of the most destructive war in history. A war that killed over 60 million people and allowed Communism to spread halfway around the world, spawning later killing in wars like Korea and Vietnam.

Do I really want to spend my last days rolling dice, eating chips and chuckling over that? They say “war is sweet to them that know it not”. I was never in the military, but I have a friend who was an artillery man in Vietnam, and I can’t get him to play. Probably because he’s seen how horrible war really is. How foolish it seems to me now for me to try to shrink all of that death and misery down to my kitchen table and make a game of it with pretty cards and dice. Much less investing thousands into a dedicated room for it. I’ve read enough memoirs of WWII soldiers to know that they didn’t dream of fighting and glory. All they wanted was for it to stop, and to go home and live normal lives.

So that’s where I am now on the journey. I appreciate all of your support and use of my ideas. Although I (somewhat impulsively) deleted all my videos, the bulk of those ideas are still in the house rules you can download elsewhere here.

I still read the forums here occasionally, and get email notifications of chat messages from those who want to reach me, so I’m around - not dead or anything!

@all-encompassing-goose Sounds good - hope you have lots of fun with it!

@coedewa Here you go…DK’s Progressive Arms Research Rules.pdf Sorry for your trouble!

interesting - thanks!

I was reading the rules for this edition today and it says you can win a standard victory by controlling 9 of 12 victory cities. There is no mention of capitals in the victory conditions.

Am I correct to say you can theoretically win this game without controlling any of the other side’s capitals?

@CWO-Marc Thank you for these insights and links - very helpful!

@GEN-MANSTEIN I’m interested in a bigger map - I just want to know it works well before going to all the effort and expense. Please send me your link when you live stream - thanks! (derkuenstlersden@zohomail.com)

I don’t get it. The UK, Russia, and Japan would logically be sitting at the top of your map closest to their capitals. But that would mean Germany could not even reach their own capital from their chair on the other side. I guess I would have to visit somebody with a big map to see it.

Confucius said “Too far is no better than not far enough.”

I’ve been seeing a lot of 4 X 8 maps out there. These obviously look impressive, but how do you practically play on them? How do you resolve the problem of not being able to reach across a 4 foot map? Where do you put all of your reference cards, battleboards, dice rollers, IPCs, and unit trays?

I can see a single guy or two doing this, spinning around to use additional tables for play aids and moving around the table, but what if you have six guys? Don’t you end up crashing into each other to get to distant parts of the map, charts, etc?

I think you are right - thank you!

@Stumblebum Thank you!

@Young-Grasshopper Thanks YG - I’ve missed fiddling with this game - it satisfies a creative urge I have in me, as well as you and others here. Even if ideas fail, they are fun to tinker with…glad to see you still around!

@GEN-MANSTEIN Thanks for the ideas - I’d like to add railroads and such since a bigger map would enable more detail. Lots to think through at this point.

Hey all, it’s been a while but I’m catching the Axis and Allies bug again. I ran a game monthly game night for six years with the same type map and can’t get excited about setting up the exact same thing again. I think it’s the Aries in me - I love to create.

So I was thinking about a new type of map. A basic limitation on maps is how far a human can comfortably stretch across them to reach things. For me this is about 41 inches. This means that the world map view lacks detail.

But what about a map where the main historic theaters (like Europe, East Asia, and Pacific) are large (blown up) and thus more detailed and conductive to tactics, and the other areas (like South America and most of Africa) are represented abstractly around the edges like maybe in blow up boxes as the original AA 1984 map had?

Does this kind of concept sound intriguing to you or would you rather still play on a less detailed overall world map?

Thank you!