Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The Anniversary Edition of Axis & Allies is probably the single most imposing game Sean has in his shop, both physically and, judging from the current figures on the BGG Marketplace, cost-wise. To tell the truth, I’d been eager to play at least one game of any version for a long while due to the franchise’s status as a gaming classic, but my enthusiasm has dwindled greatly as I gained more experience with Euros and especially since I read a copy of the rules Hiew sent me a while back. I realized that the rules are quite simple and really straightforward and the game is intimidating only because of its scale.

Nevertheless we took advantage of the Deepavali holiday in Malaysia and the addition of both Chee Wee and Neil, who continuously and loudly exclaims that Axis & Allies is his favorite boardgame ever, to have a game. In addition, Alain showed up to advise though he declined to actually participate. This meant that for the Allies, we had Neil playing as the United States, me as the Russians and Shan as the United Kingdom. On the Axis side, we had Sean as Japan and Chee Wee controlling both Germany and Italy. For the record, Sean picked the 1942 scenario as he’d previously played it before and wanted to continue his Japan strategy from an earlier game.

Even at the beginning, it’s immediately clear that some countries have more to do than others. Italy is basically a token inclusion that you don’t need another player for. The Soviets have little to do as well. Despite their pivotal role, the Russians merely has to hold territory and in our game I realized that all I needed to do, and indeed could do, was to spend all my money on infantry and defend my territories with production centers in them. The UK has small bits of troops all over the map, but most are useless, so they have little to do at the beginning except just build up. By contrast, Japan and the United States are much more complicated to play what with all of the naval and air forces they have, making for a lot of options and radically different directions they could take with them.

As it turned out, our session ended up being much shorter than expected. Sean’s Japan and Neil’s US skirmished in the Pacific but the the main point of interest was in Europe. Chee Wee decided to go for broke and went for a first-turn all-out assault on all three of Russia’s production centers on the first turn making me glad that I didn’t do anything more glamorous than reinforcing them and buying nothing but basic infantry. To everyone astonishment, due to consistently good dice rolls on my part, the Russian infantry completely obliterated the invading Germans with only easily replaced losses so I managed to keep all of the territories under attack. Shan’s UK built up a sizable force to prepare to invade the now undefended western front and managed to bomb Berlin, costing the Germans some of their precious cash.

On the next turn, I switched to building a mixture of infantry and artillery while the Germans concentrated on grabbing just one of the territories with a factory. Due to a mix up in the rules, Shan failed to load her transports up troops and so had to delay her invasion by another turn. But my Russians still had the dice in their favor and once again Germany still failed to grab the critical territory, succeeding only in grabbing only one of the minor territories that I had left almost empty. At that point Neil had to leave and left instructions on what he wanted the Americans to do, but we felt that the Axis had no hope of victory left and didn’t see any point in dragging it out any longer, so we moved to playing a Eurogame instead.

Needless to say, while I was arguably the hero of the day due to my Russians almost single-handedly stemming the German tide, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the session given that I did nothing except stock up on infantry and wait. Even in a more normal game, it seems to me that where to move your forces at any given time is pretty obvious and the most important consideration is what units to spend your money on and where to deploy them. Then of course there’s the thing I mentioned earlier about how imbalanced the roles of the different countries are.

Overall, I feel that Axis & Allies is more of a toy than a game. A more serious game would choose to either use deeper rules and be content with a smaller scale or use more abstraction to allow for a global theater. It’s like a big excuse to include lots of miniatures and lots of units. Is it really necessary for example to model artillery and infantry units separately in a game of this scale? Using miniatures for the ship types sure looks impressive at first glance, but surely using old-fashioned wargame-style counters would be more playable and take up less space? When you get down to the nitty gritty, the obsession with lots of unit types and the simplistic ruleset make for unrealistic combinations. Submarines can’t fight planes but artillery and tanks can?

If someone were to take a stab at making a serious World War 2 game on a global scale, it would have to be a game of logistics and supply lines instead of individual battles. You wouldn’t realistically be able to buy tons of new units but neither would it be easy to completely obliterate units like you can in Axis & Allies. The objective would be to rout them and wear them down, not annihilate them. I guess that there must be wargames in existence that implement sensible rules about all this so I should probably check out that scene someday.

But the worst thing about this is that despite its relative simplicity and consequent lack of gameplay, Axis & Allies still manages to take such a long time to play simply because it’s so fiddly. Our game might have been decided within two turns, which is decidedly far from normal, but we still took something like an hour a turn. And of course, you still need to take into account the time and effort needed to set it up. As Hiew recently admitted, it makes for a pretty bad fun per hour ratio. Given that length of time, I can’t see why anyone would choose this over a serious wargame with realistic rules. If you really want to play with toy soldiers, just play a real miniatures game like Flames of War instead.