The beauty of John Hill’s original game though was the simplicity of it all, the elegance even. Before they started adding +1 for MGs with three screws on the left side of the receiver type of stuff. The rules got squirrelly when the excessive grog detail started to creep in.
ASL is also my favorite wargame of all time, even though I ((like @ioticus) stopped playing a while back. Also like ioticus, I actually found ASL easier to grok than the original Squad Leader and its expansions. Or maybe ASL just arrived at a better time in my life.
I never sell my boardgames. I’ve still got all my ASL modules. Still got my three-hole punched rule book (and a couple extra binders). Got my old Avalon Hill Gettysburg (my first game), D-Day, Third Reich, you name it. And I have newer, shinier models sitting here too: your OCS games, your Labyrinths, your Churchills. Not giving em up!
@KiloOhm: congrats on your win! In my first face-to-face game, I lost on the final die roll to a player who knew the rules better than me but had no better tactical sense than I did. It was so exciting that I was hooked. I went on to play my first ASL tourney and went 3-2 as a relative newb. So hang in there! Lots of experienced ASL’ers aren’t necessarily better strategists than you are. Have fun with it. ASL may not be a completely accurate simulation, but it tells a great story, like a good WW2 movie.
I’m surprised there were even 400 wargames in existence.
I recently got into the wargame hobby after admiring it from afar my entire life. I must say - I was shocked how much choice a wargamer has nowadays. If you haven’t looked into the hobby lately, check out:
GMTGames
LegionWargames
DecisionGames
VictoryPointGames
GMT especially has some really high quality stuff.
The computer wargame I would love to have today is SSI’s old Computer Ambush made with today’s tech. Taking a squad of men through an entire war with true fog of war. I still remember trying to get my guys from one end of a village to the other, and one of the men being hit by a sniper, and one of the squad trying to rescue him before he died, while the others tried to find and eliminate the sniper (who ended up getting the squad member trying to rescue the downed man.)
I expect that MBT will drop significantly in value as it was just reprinted by GMT with significantly better components.
http://www.gmtgames.com/p-478-mbt.aspx
Tac Air and IDF will likely hold their value, though.
The thing about wargames is that originals, unless there is something really desireable about them, usually drop out of favor after a reprint appears. Because, as @tomchick would say, games are meant to be played!
The reprint costs $95!!!
Ah, kids. I threw a board once, too. I was too invested in winning the game!
But as an adult, I have found few hobbies as satisfying as board wargaming. There is a guy here (actually a bunch of guys, but one specific one who lives close) who is about my age, is a successful professional, has been playing wargames as long as I have, has just as large a collection (maybe larger), has a large house (kids) with an extra room where we can leave a game set up for weeks and (close the door to foil the cat) but most importantly is a fantastic dude who generally shares my interests. So we get together on a Saturday morning to play a game, take breaks to discuss the design, or the history, take a break to grab lunch and talk non-game stuff, then play more, and have a glass of scotch after. I really think there would be a lot more board wargames if people had the opportunity to play them this way.
In high school (1970s) I subscribed to Strategy and Tactics magazine, which got me a wargame with loads of chits in the mail every two months. Never knew any one else who would play, so I mostly studied the games and popped out the chits.
A few years later, while in college, my parents moved and all those issues, tucked away in my closet, got tossed. I was not around to consult.
Also tossed were two board games I had designed myself. One was a stealth submarine game that was simultaneous turn based (Wego) which was a mechanic I devised myself in this pre-internet world. (Not claiming I was the first, only that I thought of it on my own).
All ended up in a landfill.
Oh, yeah, the monthly S&T arrival was a Big Event. Well, for a nerd like me it was. And yeah, I had a table with plexiglass sheets to cover the paper maps, and grease pencils to draw frontages and stuff. Even in grad school the first time I had a ping-pong table set up in my friggin’ living room for monster games. No, I didn’t have many dates, thanks for asking! :)
As for numbers of games, my goodness, at the peak there were untold zillions of them, many not that good, but once physical production got cheap enough everyone and his or her uncle was making war games it seemed. You had monthly magazine games, you had series games, you had monster games, you had one-offs, all sorts of things. Storing them all got problematic, and rarely could I find anyone to play them. Not because there was no one interested, especially around colleges. But they took too long. I remember playing a game of Terrible Swift Sword which we set up at some dude’s house outside Atlanta, in a garage. We’d play one day a week, and it took months…to get through maybe the first day of the battle of Gettysburg. No one could sustain that.
MBT has been republished by GMT games.
http://www.gmtgames.com/c-51-mbt-series.aspx
I don’t know if they plan to do the IDF game eventually
Edit: and beaten by Brooski!
I think GMT has taken over the place that AH used to have in the industry. They seem to have things going really well. I wish they could buy up MMP and get their publishing going at a better clip. Or dreaming even more if they somehow could come up with the money to buy the AH IP from Hasbro.
Relevant to my interests. Cheers!
@thewombat, never say never! We have a group of guys here (mostly late-career and empty-nesters) who get together twice a week to play monsters. They’ve completed several. They keep it set up in one guy’s game room (which has room for like 6-8 people to sit) and just crank through em. And the guy I play with regularly has a full Vietnam 1965-75 game under his belt, played weekly for six months. It can be done by normal people! Nerds, but normal people :)
… and some really low quality customer service.
Apparently they ‘don’t do’ shipping notifications on P500 games. They also ‘don’t do’ replying to my emails. :)
Agreed, but in the end you’ll get the product you want at a high quality. While they don’t notify you of the shipping, they do turn it around pretty quickly.
It’s a strange hobby. This past month I bought The Barbarossa Campaign from Victory Point Games and Comancheria from GMT games (P500 pre order). I paid $60 for both of them shipped (holiday discount on TBC and P500 discount on Comancheria). The quality difference between these two games is really astounding. While TBC is a fantastic game - the counters are poor, the game maps are basically thick stock paper and it came in a large ziplock bag - very mediocre quality (except for the gameplay). Comancheria on the other hand came with a mounted Map (beautiful), really great thick stock laser cut counters, multiple manuals on nice glossy paper - just top quality in every way.
Yeah but VPG do a ‘premium’ line as well, funded through their kickstarters - which I guess is the equivalent of GMT’s P500. The Dawn of the Zeds 3rd edition quality is pretty high, for example. Big box, mounted board, die-cut counters, multiple (too many!) manuals on nice glossy paper.
Given the low population of the state I live in (600k) and the general lack of interest in anything remotely military except by survivalist types, I kinda doubt there are any other wargamers up here!
In any event, I don’t think I have it in me to master complicated wargames any more.
For the longest time, the Match Coordinator for the venerable AHIKS wargaming society lived in Stowe. I still remember mailing match requests to him in the pre-internet days!