History, Politics And Current Affairs

...Good quality scans of hundreds of SPI, Avalon Hill, and Victory Games:

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/p3ep1v ... jqxPXX_qXQ

The temptation to fix Dixie! is pretty strong here.

Mike

Lots of good campaign maps there . . .

Johnnie Lyle wrote: ↑Thu Feb 06, 2025 10:18 pm Lots of good campaign maps there . . .

Johnnie,

I'm trying to convert Berlin '82 to TOAW4, (the map's 40 km by 40 km, so that's a good one to start with) so stay tuned.

But Dixie!.....it calls to me. I should explain- Dixie! is pretty much accepted as the worst wargame of all time. Imagine if Ed Wood was detailed to design a basic wargame, and Dixie! is what you'd get.

The premise is utterly killer: the Confederacy survives the Civil War, and there's a rematch in the mid 30s. This should be amazing, even at the 50 miles/hex scale, but it self destructs as soon as you unfold the map. The units are at mostly at Corps level with a couple of division level units, and the terrain is such that none of them on either side can get very far, and even if they do they end up exhausting themselves on the fortress hexes that make up the inter-American border. Air, naval, and amphibious/marine/special forces are nonexistent.

I can fix that. Period-accurate aircraft - hell, ZEPPELINS. Riverine units carrying Marine raiders. Naval units (no subs, but I gather there's some workarounds for that), international intervention.

We have the technology.....

Mike

MikeKozlowski wrote: ↑Thu Feb 06, 2025 11:54 pm

Johnnie Lyle wrote: ↑Thu Feb 06, 2025 10:18 pm Lots of good campaign maps there . . .

Johnnie,

I'm trying to convert Berlin '82 to TOAW4, (the map's 40 km by 40 km, so that's a good one to start with) so stay tuned.

But Dixie!.....it calls to me. I should explain- Dixie! is pretty much accepted as the worst wargame of all time. Imagine if Ed Wood was detailed to design a basic wargame, and Dixie! is what you'd get.

The premise is utterly killer: the Confederacy survives the Civil War, and there's a rematch in the mid 30s. This should be amazing, even at the 50 miles/hex scale, but it self destructs as soon as you unfold the map. The units are at mostly at Corps level with a couple of division level units, and the terrain is such that none of them on either side can get very far, and even if they do they end up exhausting themselves on the fortress hexes that make up the inter-American border. Air, naval, and amphibious/marine/special forces are nonexistent.

I can fix that. Period-accurate aircraft - hell, ZEPPELINS. Riverine units carrying Marine raiders. Naval units (no subs, but I gather there's some workarounds for that), international intervention.

We have the technology.....

Mike

That sounds like they tried for WWI as presented in popular culture.

Dixie's first problem was the folio format. It's simply too small a game for its subject.

Honestly, a decent operational level game of a Civil War rematch is going to have to extend from sea to shining sea (and there's going to be questions about how far west Richmond would have gone--there were Copperheads throughout Southern California, and. a Pacific frontier for the CSA raises some interesting prospects). All that means you're going to need a larger terrain scale even as you get a bigger map, unless you go monster game, which has its own problems.

Second...they had the worst period possible. Nobody had cracked the code of returning to a battle of maneuver. Move it forward 10 years.

Third...the Action Point system sucked. I understand what they were doing, but they didn't do it right.

The population density of the lower 48 was about 1/7th that of Central Europe. You will need a different mechanism to reflect the wide open war. Maybe assign units to army or corps HQs, and maneuver the HQs on the map with an intelligence mechanic for allowing players to gather information on assigned units.

Oh, wow. That takes me back.

In the mid 80's I came across the Avalon Hill games in some kind of magazine I obtained a copy of. I still have in my attic two huge boxes of games from that era. If I recall correctly, one of them is an almost mint condition Stalingrad. I also have Africa Korps, which I have had a lot of trouble making work, mainly because I'm the only person I know who has any idea how to play these kinds of games.

Loved to see christmas morning and my birthday because I always got one or two of them. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and War in the Pacific are the two largest scale ones I have.

The Civil War games always drove me nuts because of how unable to turn to the flank the units are. I understand its historical, but it seems they've really upped the effectiveness of the flanking attack in the games focusing on that era.

Belushi TD