Try Anything Once

There are a number of games and rule systems that are recognised as stone cold classics. Sometimes they are. Sometimes it's nostalgia. I've played a lot of wargame rules from "back in the day" from "Charge!" to WRG ancients. Sometimes only once. But I've played them.

On the board wargame front there are some big gaps. I've never played Squad Leader, nor ASL. Avalon Hill games are a big gap, and where I have I've normally played the UK version. Like "Kingmaker" and the original "Civilization". I have tended to avoid the table hugging monsters, but there area few classics I'd like to give a go. My play count on SPI games is pretty good, however.

One time MNG member, the other Richard L, asked me to join him for a boardgame this Saturday. He had a couple on offer, being "Britannia" and "Axis & Allies". Both are on my list to give a go. The former is a four player, the later needs five.

For this session Richard had assembled five of us, so "Axis & Allies" it was. We were joined by Tim & Steve and a chap Richard knows from a club he visits regularly called Andy (the chap, not the club). 

Only Richard had played the game before. Andy confessed to playing it once. The rest of us never.

I ended up as Germany, partnering Andy as Japan. Tim was the USSR, Steve the UK and Richard the USA.

It is a game that is both complex and simple. My feeling is that they wanted to include everything, so it includes recruitment, an economic system and technological innovation, as well as about a dozen unit types. It has land and sea warfare, both supported by air power. The consequence is that many of the systems under pinning this complexity have to be simple, or the game would become unplayable.

I realise in saying this that I'm late to the party, and that A&A has a whole subculture that loves it. It's a game of stunning ambition to be sold in a regular toy shop by the production company Milton Bradley.

Given the nature of the game there's a lot of thinking to do. You need a plan, and the teams should probably sit down and have a strategy talk first. We didn't do that. Playing hand to mouth favours the Allies. The Axis powers, notably Germany, start with advantages in forces and resources, but they need to make them count, and early too. Blitzkrieg is an important tactic. You also need to capture two capitals out of Washington, Moscow and London or control pretty much everything on the board. With Washington pretty much out of reach you have to do Operations Sealion AND Barbarossa for the capitals win. And you need to do it early. The alternative is to rely on capturing most of the world's resources.

I was slow on the uptake on that score. 

In the early stages I thought I was doing quite well. I occupied the Leningrad zone, and was preparing to drive on Stalingrad.  The sharp eyed of you might start to notice some oddities. It takes longer to cross Germany to get to the Russian border despite all of the roads and railways designed by the Reich to do just that, than it does to drive across central Russia. And planes go further too, as their range is number of spaces, not actual distance. You can't see it here, but it is quicker to sail across the Atlantic too. Hmm. A bit odd, but presumably essential for game balance.

I lost and regained Leningrad, then captured Stalingrad. I was doing okay in North Africa, and won the equivalent of Alamein. I was neglecting France a bit, and Norway, which were mistakes. Also, because I was fighting and losing units, even with my additional resources from conquering areas to rebuild, I was being outbuilt by the UK and USA and no one was killing their stuff. They were fighting to the last Soviet infantry man. Japan wasn't really doing much except knock off soft targets at this stage.

D-Day happened. British only assault (red chip = 5 units), and France fell.

I got it back. The Americans have now arrived and are massing off Spain.

D-Day happened again. I think we may have had three in the game. In one turn I invested heavily in Technological Research and got long range aircraft, which wasn't helpful what with me being in a central position. No one else bothered in the game. You roll dice depending on how much resource you spend (I spent 30 out of 40) which got me 6 dice. I rolled one six, and then rolled again and got a what I got. You don't get to choose, which I probably should have guessed. Now, if I'd got heavy bombers (roll 3 dice instead of 1 in combat) that would have been a game changer.

Oh look. I've lost Norway too.

We'd been playing for over four hours by this point in a game scheduled to last five. My analysis of the position was that we wouldn't be able to win, partly due to poor planning and partly due to a couple of very expensive, in terms of losses, campaigns which we should have won easily. It was going to take probably another two or three hours to reach a conclusion (at least), so I suggested we call it the final round and we accept defeat with grace.

Andy had a swansong move, which involved piling everything into the US Pacific Fleet. He came off worse in that one too.

Mind you, he did occupy Australia.

I'm glad I've played this at last. We were playing 1st edition and I've read elsewhere now that 2nd edition has some changes that make major differences and is vastly superior.

I'm a shoulder shrug on how great it is as a game. There's a lot of down time between your turns in a five player game. You can do some planning whilst waiting, but that just shortens your move. If your opponents aren't doing the same it doesn't reduce your waiting.

There's obviously a lot of deep strategy possible in this game. My feeling is that (for me) the dice heavy simplistic combat means doing the heavy strategy isn't worth the brain power. You need to play this a lot to work out what to do, and if you play it enough you're going to win some and lose some. I can't think when I'm ever going to find eight hours and four other players to play this regularly enough to get a proper grip on it.

I can see that for some people of a certain age it is the game that made them realise Risk is rubbish. I got that without having to play A&A. The length means that it's that game you played as a teenager/student that whiled away days during the summer*. For me that was "Kingmaker" and to some extent "Civilization" and then various RPG campaigns. I've gone back to Kingmaker with the new version and it isn't the same now. Life has moved on. "Civilization" is still waiting for a play as we know someone with a copy. But honestly, four hours is now tops for a board game and two preferable for a multiplayer game due to the player downtime in complex games. A few years ago I played a whole series of SPI games as 2 players, and they worked okay over the long playing time. At least you only have to watch what one player is doing, rather than sit there whilst everyone else gives you a kicking before you get another turn.

Still, I'd probably give it another go if asked.

*And presumably explains why they've taken to selling spin off games intended to take two hours for the oldies returning after years away.