"I've played this one quite a few times also, but not for many years.
Alan Poulter still has the hots for it I believe. I always liked the
idea of a workable economic solution, but it is the kind of game where
you can lose before you have started if you don't plan correctly" KB
"I liked it years ago, but without R&D you couldnt
maintain an economy above social state 2." BE
"ATH works well PBEM as you have the time you need to plan actions
properly. That being said, if you look at my PBEM game:-
http://www.poulter.demon.co.uk/ath/
you will see that all players are 'losers' as no one hit Social
State 2 on turn 9 :-( ATH is a unique economic game, albeit with a
rather unforgiving system and a narrow set of victory conditions. Some
rules ambiguities have come to light due to the finicky nature of
PBEM play. In Allan Bell's PBEM game:-
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Alley/4531/index.html
We are using the R&D and fertiliser options which open the game up.
All in all an acquired taste. But then I hope Karl remembers I was the
Axis quartermaster in our abortive Campaign for North Africa game, all
those years ago. I spent a whole weekend preparing by creating cards
for all the Axis units to detail their supply needs and then working
out what was needed where and a trucking rota to deliver it. Such
fun!" AP
"I was waiting for more experienced players to describe this one, but
since they're not forthcoming I'll stick my oar in. This is one of
the best economic games in that admitedly underpopulated corner of the
hobby. It does a good job of showing the interactions among the
sectors of the economy and how difficult it is to keep the whole thing
balanced. The model it uses is simplified, of course, but less so
than what can be found in some textbooks I've taught from. From a
gaming point of view, a major problem is that war is so difficult and
expensive that there's a tendancy to turn the game into multiple
solitaire. That's teaching an important lesson, but it's not what
you want if you're in the mood to get the panzers rolling." DAV
"One of my favorite games. Our first PBEM game is nearly finished
(only took 6+ months - glad i don't play all my games that way). As
Alan Poulter points out we are all heading for a loss. The only
question now is who will be the biggest loser.
I'm GM'ing another ATH with slightly different victory conditions
which I think will increase the interaction between players. ATH can
be a four player solitaire game at times. The problem is that the
victory conditions encourage you to improve the lot of your people
rather than expand the area under your control. I never knew any
petty dictators who did it that way.
The new victory conditions reward you for having the largest
economy and the easiest way to do that is to expand your territory.
Eventually all the free land should be taken and then the fun really
begins.
ATH is reasonably complex. The rules always seemed clear to me
but that was before I played PBEM. Then I realised how I should have
been playing it all these years.
Warfare can be the most fun part of this game but the economies
are too small early in the game. With a scenario setup that gives
everyone a bigger economy, warfare can be a hoot. It means you have
to choose between winning the war and not destroying your economy.
After all, WWII was in the end an economic war. Once the US
economy cranked up there was no way the Germans could out produce it.
ATH allows you to model that to a degree.
ATH is like Napoleonics. It appeals to a certain type. It is
another game that it is hard to find ftf players because of the steep
initial learning curve and the amount of arithmetic involved. But it
seems to lend itself to PBEM gaming which adds another angle to the
game." AB
"When it first came out, I played this for a month straight. Liked it
then, and am interested in trying it again. Somehow my copy doesn't
have its rules anymore so it might take a while to get it up and
running." RM
Agincourt
James F. Dunnigan
"Colorful (some of the most beautiful counters SPI ever produced) and
much more a "sim" than a game since all the French do is line up,
charge and get shot to pieces. Thus, ultimately a dud." DM
"It's essentially a solitaire game which was fun for awhile. The
only real tension in the game was seeing if your arrow supply would
give out before the French did. A dud." JD
"Great counters (Kingmaker-like, from SPI!) but the historical
scenario is an exercise in arrow shooting and moving fugitives. Very
historical, but boring. I understand the alt-hist scenarios (no mud,
smarter French) are better, but there's still a high degree of
information-marker twiddling, as opposed to interesting
decisions." DT
"I was very disappointed with this game. It looked great but the
system never worked well enough to keep the game." RM
"A fairly nice looking game for SPI, sharp counters, but it just
didn't cut it as an interesting game. While they should have been
credited for stepping beyond the mass of WWII stuff, this needed
major tinkering." JM
"Great system. Lousy situation." GG
Air War
David Isby
"The consensus on CONSIM in previous threads has been that it's
detailed beyond what unclassified data can support. In other words,
minute differences in the performance of various hardware are
meaningless because they're apparently the product of guesswork.
Another problem is the agonizingly slow pace of the game.
Surprisingly, the procedures are not to blame -- once a player has them
down pat (admittedly a steep learning curve) all the bookkeeping and
movement for a given plane can be completed relatively quickly.
Instead, the 2.5-second/game-turn scale makes jet combat seem as
ponderous as a brontosaurus. In a typical scenario a plane might use
as much as one-fourth of the alloted game-turns just to turn 180
degrees. Yet another problem is missile combat: it actually takes
more skill to fly an air-to-air missile to its target than it takes
to fly a plane. Because of this I've usually fired two missiles at a
crossing target, one missile flying lead pursuit and the other lag
pursuit. But I can't help scratching my head over this remarkable
missile AI and wondering, "Huh? What in real life is this supposed to
be modeling?" This is just one area in which a little abstraction
would have improved the design. Bottom line: not so much a dud as a
disappointment." DSB
"For a long time this was THE game for me. I still keep a copy for
myself although I haven't played it for a long time. I love aircraft
games, and this one was the king. Out of the three this one is the
most dated now though. I would rather play the JD Webster system these
days (sigh)" KB
"We had fun playing Air War. I've said before that I even recruited
people to the hobby with it; 4 only ever played Air War and for
another 2 of them AW was the only wargame they ever bought! If you
tried to master the game system then AW was impossible to play. There
were too many oversights and other problems with the rules. If you
studied the rules just enough to figure out how to use the aircraft
control displays then you could have a blast. If it weren't for the
scale they chose I'd probably prefer AW to the Webster games. The
lest intuitive part of AW was the acceleration, the scale needed to
be adjusted to where you could actually change speed in one turn.
While I find Webster's system nice, it has a lot of problems also.
In particular he had a generic flight model for every aircraft. Then
you have a lot of optional rules to handle the special case such as
high bleed aircraft and high rate of roll aircraft. In AW those
features were "built-in" to the data charts and you didn't have to
try and remember each case. Actually, for Korean War era combats I'd
probably prefer Air War even now. Webster did a much better job of
abstracting out all of the modern technology into a few die rolls.
Even then people knocked Air Superiority because with modern aircraft
such as the F-15 and MIG-29, 'combat' became a matter of who got the
first lucky die roll.
"Somehow I managed to end up with three copies of this, due no doubt
to poor planning on my part.
The first time I saw this one, I started calculating how much time it
would take to write a computer-assist program for it. Air War is quite
possibly the best example of a manual game that screams out for
computer-assist: many pages o' charts, big record log sheet (aka
"character sheet") for keeping track of each unit's data as the game
progresses, many complicated procedures that are easily automated. I
came up with a rough estimate that it would take about 250 to 300
hours of programming to get all the systems in and key in all the
data, which isn't too bad, but then the "why bother?" flag goes up
and the klaxons start to blare. Air War was pretty cool for its day,
but is hopelessly out of date (both weapons data-wise and game design-
-wise) so even though it'd be a pretty easy (and probably quick) game
if it had a well-designed computer-assist front end, the effort
required to create such a computer-assist program wouldn't be worth
it. Much easier to just go crank up one of the many computer flight
sims that are already out there; more playable, and at least as
accurate." DLF
"This could be a full-semester college course! At the time,
incomparable, but now it would probably be better to look toward J.D.
Webster's excellent air sims from GDW and Clash of Arms." DH
Air War Update Kit
David Isby
"This is worthwhile acquiring for a number of reasons, the primary one
being several pages of errata more comprehensive than the original
errata (published in MOVES?). Unfortunately the Update's errata is
not as comprehensive as it should be -- my "personal errata sheet"
runs on for page after page -- nor is it completely consistent with
the main rules. Besides new planes the Update provides new rules,
primarily in the area of air-to-ground ordnance. Reportedly the new
bombing rules introduce the radical concept of Newtonian physics, but
I didn't progress that far in absorbing the original rules so I can't
judge for myself. A personal nit-pick is that the Update provides two
new special maneuvers, climbing and diving vertical rolls. These
seem so superior to the other special manuevers for changing
direction I don't see why a player would ever use an Immelman or
Wingover again. As far as I know, no errata appeared for the new rules
in the Update. As you can guess, it could use some. Finally, I don't
have the TSR re-issue, but I'm under the impression that it was a
straight reprint with both the original and the update in a
single box."
Alamo, The
Eric Lee Smith
"Weird map that "distorted" and abstracted the actual Alamo
to the extent that it was unrecognizable. Hard to "win" for the
Texan: one mistake would cost the game. Leaders were key. A leader
like Travis with a high morale unit stashed in a building could wreak
havoc. If the Mexicans made it into the compound on Turn 1,
goodnight. Though I prefered the microgame RtA by TSR to this
approach...dud." DM
"I agree with Doug in that this is a dud. We had just the opposite
experience with play balance though. As the Texan, we would blast
away until (or should I say "if") a Mex unit made it into the
compound, and then hop inside for some real urban combat. The Texans
were real hard to pry out of the church and barracks." JD
"Not a bad game, but it didn't strike me as a very good game either.
I've used it successfully to rope in a new gamer or two over the years
though." RM
"One of our favorites here. It's hard to be the Mexican, but fun
once you get in the Alamo confines. We've had some good, close games.
And some blowouts." GG
Alma
J Matisse Enzer
"Alma is from the period after the AH classics but before the
command-control revolution that swept gaming. As such, it tries to
improvise tools to deal with a war in which the main problem on both
sides was command and control. Since the battle itself is a set-piece
river crossing, the game succeeds fairly well. One does get the
feeling for the Allied advantages in firepower and morale pitted
against the Russian numbers and solidity. My main objection to the
game is that it leaves out the cavalry. The designer says that he
left them out because they played so little part in the actual battle,
which would have been quite different if either side employed their
horse effectively. Well, exactly. The gamers are thus prevented from
exploring some of the most interesting "What if?" aspects of the
battle, because the designer doesn't want them to." DAV
"This game was passable but really didn't do justice to the battle.
I'd rate it a disappointment." RM
