A question for old grognards

[MrBoats]

I was thinking back to the days of the monster boardgames and I wondered if any of us ever finished any of them? I played mine solo, and by the time I finished setting up Fire in the East or Pacific War (the campaign game) I longed for a quick Ambush scenario or maybe a few turns of Third Reich. I loved seeing the 4' X 8' maps and the stacks and stacks of counters set up, but the actual playing of the monsters was a chore at times. Of course, I'd give anything for a computer FITE, and we have WITP, but I think I'd like to have my cake (the physical pleasure of looking at the giant maps) and eat it too (a computer program to handle the calculations). The WITP planning map is as close as I'll get, I think. The first company to complete a division-level WWII game with hexes and a decent a/i will make a tidy profit from it. I really don't like area movement.

It was probably my fault for not joining a club (I lived in NYC and there must have been a grognard club or two around), but 16 hour days at work did not allow for much getting out and about. I'm just curious whether anyone finished FITE, or Terrible Swift Sword, Campaign for North Africa, etc., either solo or in team play.

Thanks!

[Yogi the Great]

The idea was to set them up, admire them and promise that some day you would finish a game. 
 
I remember "The longest Day" and War and Peace" (which I have) from Avalon Hill  Almost finished War & Peace solitare once.
 
By the way, [:-] just to be nice, just use gorgnard and leave the OLD out of it.  We have feelings you know.

[SMK-at-work]

I remember one of WW1 being setup at the local wargames club for over a year.  Turns were actually done and progress made, but even with 2 meetings per week in dedicated premises it didn't get finished!!
 
Other games I recall having started and never finished include DNO (& Unentschieden), and Korsun Pocket by Simulations Canada(?).
 
I'm pretty sure theose weer the only 3 I ever tried.

[sprior]

I started AH's The Longest Day,Third Reich and the 1st ASL campaign (can't remember its name), VG's Vietnam, Victory Games' Pacific War, Enemy at the Gates and DAK

[Brigz]

ORIGINAL: sprior

I started AH's The Longest Day,Third Reich and the 1st ASL campaign (can't remember its name), VG's Vietnam, Victory Games' Pacific War, Enemy at the Gates and DAK

You never played VG's "The Civil War"? Cripes, you missed the best one of the bunch.[;)]

[sprior]

ORIGINAL: Dave Briggs

ORIGINAL: sprior

I started AH's The Longest Day,Third Reich and the 1st ASL campaign (can't remember its name), VG's Vietnam, Victory Games' Pacific War, Enemy at the Gates and DAK

You never played VG's "The Civil War"? Cripes, you missed the best one of the bunch.[;)]

I own it, never got round to playing it...

[105mm Howitzer]

Hmmm, finished Highway to the Reich ( once) and Global War, plus Third Reich. I was more into "medium" length games myself. ( Squad Leader/COI, Blitzkrieg ( anyone remember that one?)
That being said, I am still looking for a copy of SPI's Global War. ( probably to decorate my shelf)
[X(]

[Bloodybucket28th]

I finished a multiplayer game of World in Flames.  Biggest game I ever participated in that made it to conclusion.
 
I'll second VG's Civil War as being excellent, and say that Ageod's ACW computer game is the closest thing to an electronic version I've found.

[Sarge]

A World at War , and yes I completed it with opponents.

But I lean towards tactical (Combat Commander Europe) more then grand strategy in board games.

To much time and space is required, funny thing is I thought I would have all the time in the world to play out WWII on a monster scale as I grew older, but I’ll be GD if I have less time now then when I was 18.[&:]

[MrBoats]

Yogi,

My apologies -- I meant to write "seasoned" or "veteran." The O word slipped in there when I realized I'm coming up on 30 years of wargaming. I picked up Tactics II in October of '78 for six bucks and played it till the counters were all dog-eared.

VG's Civil War was excellent! I played that one many, many times. I wanted to create a computer version with Aide de Camp but never finished it. I agree that AACW is a worthy successor. The Longest Day was good, but I didn't like the pre-printed set-up areas.

Blitzkrieg was a good one, too.

One of the biggest problems with the monsters was that non-gamers never seemed to understand that 3,000 unit counters were where they were FOR A REASON! I lived in a boarding house and had half of my tiny room devoted to Fire in the East. One day when I was at work the cleaning lady picked up the maps and slid all of the counters into the box while she cleaned around the map table! When I got home I felt like I had been punched in the gut.

[HansBolter]

As an OLD grog I indeed played many a mega-game to completion.

The list includes:

Fire in the East / Scorched earth: Played several 6 player games to completion.

Wacht am Rhein: Played many, many 2 and 4 player games to completion

The Longest Day: Even changed residences in the middle of a game and still completed it against my brother. We copied the deployment maps, whited out the unit set up and used the blanks to record the location of every unit. I moved and we set it back up from where we left off and played it to the end.

A couple of people have mentioned Third Reich, but I never really considered it a mega-game. I played Third Reich probably more than all other games combined. My group of buddies and I played every version to death and even playtested Adanced Third Reich for 2.5 years and got our names published in the design credits. We also played the heck out of every other grand strategy game: ETO/PTO Advanced ETO/PTO, WWII, Krieg and Totaler Krieg.

Unfortunately, I never played Highway to the Reich or The Campaign for North Africa.

[HansBolter]

ORIGINAL: MrBoats

Yogi,

My apologies -- I meant to write "seasoned" or "veteran." The O word slipped in there when I realized I'm coming up on 30 years of wargaming. I picked up Tactics II in October of '78 for six bucks and played it till the counters were all dog-eared.

VG's Civil War was excellent! I played that one many, many times. I wanted to create a computer version with Aide de Camp but never finished it. I agree that AACW is a worthy successor. The Longest Day was good, but I didn't like the pre-printed set-up areas.

Blitzkrieg was a good one, too.

One of the biggest problems with the monsters was that non-gamers never seemed to understand that 3,000 unit counters were where they were FOR A REASON! I lived in a boarding house and had half of my tiny room devoted to Fire in the East. One day when I was at work the cleaning lady picked up the maps and slid all of the counters into the box while she cleaned around the map table! When I got home I felt like I had been punched in the gut.

As for dog-eared countermixes......I completely wore out two countermixes of the AH classic Russian Campaign. My current copy is the third one in my collection.

The Longest Day had one of the BEST countermixes ever created for a wargame. The German army unit symbology was absolutely awesome. The game mechanics system was the same as used in the Air Assault on Crete/ Malta game and we didn't like the fact that the airborne battalions didn't break down into companies and scatter the way they did in the Crete/Malta game so we made breakdown counters and used the scatter table from Crete/Malta. It made for a more realistic scattering, leaving a literal carpet of airborne companies across the Cotentin peninsula.

[Yogi the Great]

I owned most all Avalon Hill games, a number of VG games, a number of SPI and a spattering of several lesser companies.  Started with the original AH Gettysburg (with the squares)

Games I played the Most (in no particular order)
     Battle of the Bulge (AH)
     Gettysburg (AH) hex version
     Afrika Corp (AH)
     Russian Campaign (AH)
     Third Reich (AH)
     Anzio (AH)
     Waterloo (AH)
     1776 (AH)
     Blitzkrieg (AH)
     Squad Leader (AH)
     Civil War (VG)  yes a  great game as metioned
     Several others probably could/should be mentioned

As I have mentioned a number of times, I would love to see these games faithfully recreated for the PC.

[HansBolter]

ORIGINAL: Yogi the Great

I owned most all Avalon Hill games, a number of VG games, a number of SPI and a spattering of several lesser companies.  Started with the original AH Gettysburg (with the squares)

Games I played the Most (in no particular order)
     Battle of the Bulge (AH)
     Gettysburg (AH) hex version
     Afrika Corp (AH)
     Russian Campaign (AH)
     Third Reich (AH)
     Anzio (AH)
     Waterloo (AH)
     1776 (AH)
     Blitzkrieg (AH)
     Squad Leader (AH)
     Civil War (VG)  yes a  great game as metioned
     Several others probably could/should be mentioned

As I have mentioned a number of times, I would love to see these games faithfully recreated for the PC.

We would seem to be contemporaries.

My game collection pretty much mimics yours.

My first wargame (not counting Battleship, Stratego, Broadsides and Hit the Beach) was Kriegspiel, folowed by Blitzkrieg and then the two games I really, really cut my wargaming teeth on Panzer Blitz and Panzer Leader.

After my two best wargame buddies moved away (we played religiously every Friday or Saturday night for 15 years) and computer games came of age, I drifted away from boardgaming for almost 10 years. Recently I heard from a group of guys from a nearby city we used to play FitE/SE with (those six player games I mentioned above) wondering if I was still interested in boardgaming. I've started playing the Gamers Operational Combat System game of Tunisia with the three of them on Thursday nights. It's been fun getting back to face to face gaming again.

[MrBoats]

By the mid-80's I had acquired all of the games listed above, with the exception of Anzio. Yaquinto had two superb games: The Thin Red Line (Waterloo) and Pickett's Charge. SPI released Operation SeaLion in '79 (I think) and it was one that I played to death. I always wanted to subscribe to their game/magazine issues, but money was short in those days [:(]!

Panzer Leader, Panzer Blitz and then the Squad Leader series -- but I never mastered ASL. The Ambush series was good, as well as Sniper by SPI.

The Longest Day felt like a professional wargame, I think largely because of the German unit symbology. I did complete the Mortain secnario but never the campaign game. I still have the manual, but none of the other components.

My compliments to HansBolter for finishing the monsters. It must have been pretty satisfying. And the take-down/setup of TLD makes you a master logistician! I think that feat is comparable to Patton's 90 degree turn in the Ardennes. I agree about Third Reich -- it was complex enough without the space and time requirements of the monsters.

Did anyone else play Tobruk? I am reminded of it when I play Steel Panthers or CMAK.

Thanks for all the responses!

[simovitch]

I played AH's 3rd Reich countless times as a Kid. dozens of other games too by AH, SPI, S&T etc. all the way back to 1970. AH's Tobruk? you betcha.

In the late '80's I wrote a player-aid program for Longest Day that automatically calculated the para-drop results and managed air power, supply, rail, combat results, etc. I also computerized AH's Knights of the Air including entering all the aircraft data. The graphics would display your target aircraft getting larger/smaller and up/down - side to side, show your throttle settings and altitude guages, and calculate your nose-aspect with respect to the target and combat results.

It's all garbage-ware now.[:(]

[a white rabbit]

..Terrible Swift Sword and War between the States to completion in approx 16 months each, and War in the East multiple player, one weekend Friday lunch to Monday lunch with speed Monopoly (full rules start to finish)whilst they did their turn ...

[Skipjack]

It sounds like we all have similar gaming history - I played 3rd Reich so much during the 80's we had multiple copies, all "dog-eared' to varying degrees. Russian Campaign, Waterloo, Afrika Corps also got their wear and tear. We discovered VG's Civil War late but found it to be one of the best.

To address the original issue, I bought VG's Pacific War (3000+ counters), never played it. Victory in the Pacific remains my favorite board game for that theatre. Until I bought Gary Grisby's Pacific War, which pretty much ended board gaming for me (and ultimately led me to this website).

Yogi, I see you are from Wisconsin - did you ever get to a GenCon convention in Milwaukee? Those were days - a veritable Disneyland of wargaming [:)]

Here are some dog-eared counters - just for fun [:)]

[MrBoats]

VG's Pacific War seemed -- if my memory serves me well -- like a board version of WITP, at least in its complexity. I didn't have the space for all of the charts and the unit handling sheets, nor the time to plot out moves for both sides. GG's Pacific War "converted" me too -- that was the point at which I shelved the board games for good. And I had been getting into the AH Civil War campaign games by that point, but it was impossible to set up all the maps and counters and keep everything stable.

I wonder if a lot of us old-timers want the tactile pleasure of the counters and maps along with the convenience of the computer. On the other hand, I don't ever want to try to move stacks of twenty counters around each other again. I guess what I need to do is hook up the laptop to a LCD projector and beam my games onto the living room wall.

Skipjack -- thanks for the pics! Takes me back to 1981. I was playing 3R and VITP at that time, and my buddy and I worked on a super-VITP with nearly every ship afloat represented. Figuring out the correct counter ratings was fun (and only a true grognard would say that!).

[ezzler]

Played to completion :

VG Civil War {Jackson and Lyon both died at 2* and A S Johnston went down in his first battle}

VG Vietnam until around 1969 when as the Usa I bought the troops home in a kind of Jimmy Carter way.

WIF. Many times .. last one I remember the USSR frontline cracked wide open and all the dieppes and Anzios did nothing to help.

Fortress Europa AH. Hung in the balance a lot longer than it should have .. a good often overlooked normandy game.

Federation and Empire { the game didn't even come ith enough counters to play it.. you had to draft in all your sfb counters}. I don't remember anything except wishing someone would invent a computer to do all the paperwork}

ASL . The operation Huskey monster game.
On the first day there is about 30 mapboards and only some 20 counters each side. takes all day just to march to the guns, but  really did show the value of soft vehicles which are normally just 'roadblocks to be' in ASL

Midway GDW. Every ship and plane and pre plotted movement. Japs won , even with the erratta left in for the super 5 hex midway radar. { Sunk the Yamato though}

And one I really did like was freedom in the galaxy or something similar. A star wars universe copy, which I believe DV games has over on his site.

+ warrior knights, Sealion Europa version , Kingmaker , Russian campaign , Leopard 11 the big scenarion , Harpoon South Atlantic Falklands game { which is terrific} Blood Royale , Trafalger {played on wooden ships iron men}
and 3rd reich of course.

Never completed but set up:
Kursk {sooo boring..}
Patton in flames { to old, not enough time }
The longest day
The stalingrad module for ASL
victory in the pacific
eagle against the sun
guns of august