A game. I hope this plays. It made my brain hurt even thinking of all the things you have to do to play a single turned.
6 Likes
Once upon a time I completed a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle.
The pieces for the background were all a mushy green pattern, about as individual as the reverse side of the pieces. I might as well have used the faint structure on the reverse side
as guidance instead of the actual motive.
I would rather do one or two more jigsaw puzzles of the same difficulty level than play this board game. I wouldnât want my headstone to read: Bored to death by a board game
1 Like
My that is insane complexity for a game. As a retired logistician doing up a ToE would enough for me. Itâs like you need a support team for one player, kinda like a real general would have!
2 Likes
Back in the day I played many a board war game, Avalon Hill and Strategy and Tactics. Amassed a library of over 200 games. Some were extremely complicated rules wise. Advanced Squad Leader comes immediately to mind. Others were relatively simple. But at that time thatâs all we had, no computer to handle the rules and such. As a teenager and twenty something I learned a lot about tactics, strategy, and logistics. Studying the counters for Panzerblitz really piqued my interest in military history.
7 Likes
I had a ton of those Avalon Hill games. Could never find anybody that wanted to take the time to learn to play them. They werenât really designed for solo play. Ended up selling them off.
1 Like
If this hurts your brain, try advanced squad leader, thatâs a whole new level of pain 
4 Likes
Advanced Squad Leader had a learning curve eventually I became comfortable with the game. Of course, trying to incorporate a new country into it, occasionally introduced some unique characteristics and rules. I never did get the Pacific War expansion pack. I never learned what âlow crawlâ was. A lot of those I gleaned from the Avalon Hill magazine The General. I tried to learn as many of the new rules from that without having to actually spend money to buy the expansion packs beyond Crescendo of Doom.
But it was a good time.
3 Likes
Great for the flight to Mars.
1 Like
Thatâs a shame. I had a small but active group of people that I could play various games with. Good friend of mine, he unpacked his after some 30 years and we have plans to try to play them again someday. But work, life, everything else gets in the way.
Retirement! Iâm coming for you!
1 Like
If you all will indulge me I will share my story. Started building at eight years old and became interested in history, especially military history. As a kid I belonged to a couple of book clubs and mom woul order books that I picked out, almost always military related.
While I had dabbled in some wargames before college my roommate brought Panzerblitz with him our freshman year. Started playing. I became intrigued with the various values for movement, defense, etc. Why were some values higher for the Germans and not the Russians, and vice versa. So, I began reading everything I could about the German Army which led me to the history of Germany in general, which led me to Prussia which led me to the Holy Roman Empire, which led me to the history of Europe on broad terms at first which progressed into social and economic history. Of course there was the history of the individual kingdoms and countries. All the while Iâm still building models, by my mid 20s mostly armor. Meanwhile I switched majors from biology to history. Summer of my sophomore year I did the PLC course in Quantico. Broke my wrist five weeks into the six week course and was NPQed. Never went back. By junior year I decided I wanted to be a history professor.
The long and short of all this is that modeling and war gaming led directly to me becoming a historian with a concentration in modern military history. Modern being defined as starting with the French Revolution and Wars of the Corsican.
3 Likes
This doesn´t scare one who have Advanced Squad leader with all its modules and Avalon Hill´s THE LONGEST DAY which represent the allied landings and breakout of Normandy. Played this once through with a friend during high school holidays and we played it at the cellar´s floor for whole six days. My mother brought us drinks and food from time to time and muttered more and more about the smell of sweat down there . This game could be played also by 10 people each side if you split up air, naval, railroad, replacement units and even down to just command single divisions and their supplies. Would love to play these games agailn
3 Likes
WUT you say?
Try the crawl where the whole body is lifted, straight as a plank, on toes and elbows,
shifted forward 5 inches, lowered down, clear the next 5 to 10 inches from leaves, twigs
or any other debris that might make a sound.
It is slow and silent but not suited for a beer gut âŚ
2 Likes
200 IQ idea 
3 Likes
Best wargame I played âback in the dayâ was a card game called Ace of Aces. You each had a deck and picked a manouvre from a row of symbols at the top. Then you each went to a numbered card to see the outcome - truly genius! It took literally minutes to learn, and less to set up, with no marker pieces or terrain map. Best of all the same mechanism was used for packs ranging from WW1 biplanes to modern jets, so you could dogfight the Red Baron in your F-14âŚ
3 Likes
Oops. I should have clarified that I never figured out the A Squad Leader game mechanics for Low Crawl. Read about it in TG but did not figure out what movement and vulnerability it allowed.
Aha!
Makes sense.
Campaign for North Africa requires you to, each turn, distribute and consume stores, track and allocate water to your units accounting for spillage and evaporation (with special rules for different nationalities, such as the British increased loss from the use of âflimsiesâ, and the Italian requirement for extra water to cook their pasta), adjusting all supply dumps, determine weather (hotter weather increases water evaporation), distribute water, determine attrition of units short of water and stores⌠and thatâs just two of the aspects of the turn process. For example, each turn, each nationality loses 3% of its fuel to evaporation, except for the British, who lose 7% due to their use of 55-gallon drums instead of jerry cans; this affects movement, where you have to track fuel expenditure (modified by weather). CNA is a game that cries out for computer support, except thereâs no one who would put in the work for such a niche game.
1 Like
A fleet action in Star Fleet Battles with all the rules in play is far more complicated than the game in the first post, or any of the other games mentioned above.
3 Likes
This looks less like a game and more like a full time job to play!
Itâs certainly a lot more complex than the game me a school mate made up. I had a rule book of sorts, more like a brief history of tank development and battles and about the last dozen pages with suggestions for rules. It did have a useful set of charts with tank armour and gun ranges, penetration power etc that was useful to work out hits and damage. Still got it lying around somewhere. Played with a bunch of Airfix and Matchbox tanks (still readily available and cheap in the 90âs), vehicles and figures on an old blanket. Nothing more complicated than rolling a couple of 6 sided dice to decide hits and damage. I was the modeller of course, he wasnât and I probably invested more into it. We lost interest after a while.