Posts made by djensen

@CentralCommando Yes! I’ll be offering that for purchase soon: $25

The new website is coming along nicely. At first it may not seem like much – except that it will be blazing fast (forum will remain the same speed).

I’m adding a few things to get to you visit the homepage more often:

• Featured videos: I’m going to automatically pull in videos from various folks and list them on the site
• Events: events are a hassle to maintain so I’ll let you do it! I’m going to have a form that goes from form automatically to the website (upon approval, of course). However, there are some of you that will be whitelisted for creating events and those will get synced immediately.

Other ideas on deck:

• Featured forum discussions
• “Shopping” page
• AI written news – this one is tougher but the idea is to automatically detect announcements from Renegade have an llm parse them and draft an article.

Also, when I first started this site, it was a bit of a technical playground for me. In the early 2000s, it wasn’t easy to host a site and the challenge was fun. I even built a static site generator in 2000 before it was a thing (I used XML and XSLT). It was even more difficult to get a database going to set up a forum. The act of doing this project and seeing that a community coalesced around it was awesome.

With GenAI and code “co-pilots” I’m getting back to those roots of experimentation and technical exploration to create something for the A&A community. I’ve literally wanted to build a real odds calculator for A&A since 1996. Now, it shouldn’t be too difficult. I created this linktree-style site in a few minutes, instead of hours: https://axisandallies.link

And weeks of work to create a new site and migrate off of Wordpress will turns a weeks-long project into days.

Now when I do a little work here and a little work there, real progress is made.

Anyway, keep an eye out for some fun stuff this year.

I’ve been running this site for 25 years and have been enjoying doing it. Even when I’m not very active, I see the metrics and know that people are still enjoying themselves.

I didn’t really think about how to celebrate until mid-January and I had this idea for a league-style, play all the versions of A&A type thing. I decided there are better ways to celebrate. Maybe we’ll do that one day but not this year.

The main way I’m going to celebrate is:

• Have fun playing the game, in person
• Have fun updating the site and creating content
• Have fun talking with folks here, on the socials, and definitely in person about the game
• Maybe give some stuff away, if our sponsors are up for it
• Create a special badge for 25 years

You might see a patten. 😉

And I’ve already started. I went to OrcCon in LA with @rmorel and met up with @The_Good_Captain. Typically, I’ll only play 1 game of A&A at that conference. I play 2x D-Day, 1x Anniversary, and Fortress America (that counts, right?)

I’m probably going to attend a BBR event (the one in St. Louis might be too soon).

I’m considering the Spring Gathering.

I’ll definitely be at Gen Con and I’ll be running an Axis & Allies Campaign Tournament. Again, at Gen Con, I’ll usually play other games, but this year, my focus is A&A.

If there are some other must attend A&A events that you’d like to see me at, please let me know!

As for the website and content. I’m working on the blog part of the site and I’ve started creating YouTube shorts. Since they’re “short” it’s less time to put them together and it’s fun.

@Peteypavlik72 Yes!

So, I think I’m going to push this out another several months. To celebrate 25, I think I just want to get back into the swing of things. Maybe do a giveaway. Go to a bunch of events. And play lot’s of A&A. Be more active here.

It may be an open secret but I just don’t play a ton of A&A these days.

However, I really, really enjoyed playtesting Stalingrad last Fall. I played som D-Day with @The_Good_Captain recently. Two games in a row; first one he shut me out. Second one was closer but he won hands down. Despite the loss, it was awesome. The next day @rmorel and I played Anniversary edition with Dale (not sue if he’s here), my dice were on fire but even if they were not; it was a great time.

I’m going to do more of that. Work on the website. Run an event at GenCon, etc.

@barnee It’s what @FlyingBadger pointed out. However, I think it’s a slight variation.

I think you zoomed in on the page. In Chrome on MacOS, I do this by hitting Cmd-+ to zoom in or Cmd-- to zoom out. I know this because my eyes are just not what they used to be (but still pretty good, not complaining, yet) so I’ll occasionally zoom my browser or code editor, etc. If you zoom in too much, it’s the same as having your window too small.

BTW, everybody should have their badges now.

If anybody is curious about the process to add badges, here’s how it goes:

• Log onto PayPal, open all the transactions that appear to be support drive related. Usually easy because it’s Firstname Lastname. But if your account has a business name instead, it gets confusing.
• Open up the group page for Patron 2025 - (Gold|Silver|Bronze)
• Paste username into the search, wait for it to pop-up
• Add the username to the group
• Click on the username
• 3 dots
• Edit
• Go to the Group multi-select box and reorder 2025 to the top of the list
• Select all the groups
• Save

This does not include adding to the table of patrons, which I’m also behind on.

Phew!

Looks like I’m a little behind. I’ll get to it this weekend.

@The-Captain Do you already have a PayPal account? If so, you might need to log in. If you do not have a PayPal account, it should work.

@surfer It’s probably a misconfiguration on my side. I’ll take a look.

@DoManMacgee said in Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup:

• If there ends up being a lack of interest for whatever reason, might it be possible to downsize to 3-person teams to keep the same general format, just with 1v1 games instead of 2v2 (this is more of a hypothetical than an actual request)?

This could happen. Let’s start with 6. If we can’t get 12-16 teams, then we can allow teams to split if they so desire.

• When two teams play each other, how does picking the game edition(s) to play on work (beyond the restriction of 42SE for T8, AA50 for T4, G40 for finals)? Do the teams mutually agree on what editions get played, is it randomly generated, or a mix (i.e. team A picks 1 game, team B picks 1 game, 3rd game is picked randomly)?

The tricky part here is if teams want to get together in person but none of the 12 people have a copy of the game, then what do you do? Otherwise I would prefer random.

What I’m thinking is that I would randomly assign the team pairings and the game they must play but not the squads.

For instance:
AA vs. BB Guadalcanal
AA vs. CC Revised
AA vs. DD: Classic

…and so on but you should have 3 games going at the same time at any given time.

For instance; for the round robin let’s say we have three teams:
Amazing Armada
Brilliant Bombardiers
Cruising Corsairs
Deadly Dogfighters

AA Squad 1 vs. BB Squad 1: Guadalcanal, AA win
AA Squad 2 vs. CC Squad 1: Revised, AA win
AA Squad 3 vs. DD Squad 1: Classic, AA loss
BB Squad 2 vs DD Squad 2: Revised, BB win
BB Squad 3 vs. CC Squad 2: Classic, BB loss
CC Squad 3 vs. DD Squad 3: Guad, CC loss

Of course, it would be more randomized.

And of course I created a scenario with a tie. With more team and more games and sending 8 to the knockout round, it should be less of a problem.

@DoManMacgee said in Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup:

ounds cool to me. Is 5-6 people too many for one team? Maybe 4-6 instead?

I clarified it in the description. You really need 6 people because you’re going to have squads of 2 people playing other squads of two people.

I’m also open to suggestions for this Cup.

To celebrate both Axis & Allies month as well as the 25th Anniversary of this very website, we will hold the first ever Axis & Allies Cup, a team-based, year-long competition. Get a team of 5-6 of your best players together and find out who is the best Axis & Allies team in the world.

Details to follow but it will basically work like this:

• This will be an event that takes place over the course of several months. Ideally, no more than 12 months.
• There will be two rounds to the tournament. The first is round-robin-like and the second is a elimination.
• In the first round, every team will play other teams in various versions of A&A
  • Each team has 3 squads and squads from different teams play each other. This makes it a team sport and it allows us to play a ton of A&A in a shorter period of time.
  • Versions under consideration: Classic, Revised, Guadalcanal, D-Day, North Africa, 1914, Battle of the Bulge, 1941 (maybe), old Pacific, old Europe, Zombies (lol, j/k).
    might be a tie breaker but that is TBD.
• The second round will be single elimination
  • The eight best teams will play a Quarter Final in 1942SE
  • The four best teams will play a Semi-Final in Anniversary Edition
  • The winers in the semis will play a Final match with Global
• Matches can be played online, in person, via Zoom, whatever you like
  • If you play in person, we might so something special for you. In person matches

If you can’t find 4-5 fiends for a team, we can work on putting folks together.

Ideally, we start in early February so folks can plan their matches.

This is a pre-announcement because I don’t have the details worked out. If you’re interested, please shout out in this thread.

Posted: Jan. 16 at 11:35am PT
Updated: Jan. 16 at 3:00pm PT