ORIGINAL: Mobius
That game was so hyped. I bought one of the first 500 signed copies the cover wasn't even in color and played it maybe 6 times. There were so many die rolls and so many hits that disappeared into the ether of space. There just was not even a location listed for them.
IMO, it represented something of a turning-point in game design, perhaps a wrong-turn. On the one hand, it was far more detailed than other battlefield games of the time, such as PanzerBlitz. The rules were easy enough to digest, and while somewhat lengthy, not terribly complex.
I suspect that the real problem with Tobruk was that it really wasn't a boardgame at all. In fact, you could take the exact same rules to a nice, flat felt-map and go to town with some GHQ Microarmor. It was just that simple. As Mobius states, there was a monstrous amount of die-rolling involved. But, what decent miniatures games ends before 3AM, anyhow?
At the time, it seemed as though decades passed before Squad Leader appeared. When it did, the older title simply evaporated. People wanted to play a game, not a simulation or miniatures-game on a board. And thus it would remain, until Combat Mission appeared and resolved the combat resolution issue via a CPU (rather than dice and tables).
I still play a form of Tobruk, BTW, that's published by Critical Hit publications. The publisher also has a line of ASL products for anyone who's interested:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3992/advanced-tobruk
Advanced Tobruk is a lot more like ASL, than it's progenitor, which is to say that's it's far less like Tobruk than is Combat Mission.[;)]
