Interesting AA site for customizers

[Imperious Leader]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/123lawrence/sets/72157623831802086

[Tjoek]

Thanks for sharing IL! The scale is insane. The infantery is on a poker chip as base  :-o

[robert t]

I think it loses something when you don’t have a bunch of infantry or tanks in an area. :-D

I prefer limited use of chips, a visual thing about a front looking like a front.

That size board would be great to use those “poker” rakes with. Just like the war rooms of WWII.

[Imperious Leader]

Much respect to these guys, but they are kinda in a time warp playing the milton bradley edition

[Midnight_Reaper]

@Imperious:

Much respect to these guys, but they are kinda in a time warp playing the milton bradley edition

I suspect that they’ve been working on that setup since the Milton Bradley edition was all there was out there. Still, it looks wicked cool.

-Midnight_Reaper

[Navymule]

I can only imagine how awesome Global would be to play at this scale.

[CWO Marc]

@Navymule:

I can only imagine how awesome Global would be to play at this scale.

I can’t recall if I ever did the calculations for this, but I’ve wondered what size a Global 1940 mapboard would be if it was scaled up in size to allow HBG’s 3.5" roundel-themed beverage coasters (http://www.historicalboardgaming.com/HBG-60-pt-Beverage-Coasters_p_388.html) to be used as territorial control markers.

[Navymule]

@CWO:

@Navymule:

I can only imagine how awesome Global would be to play at this scale.

I can’t recall if I ever did the calculations for this, but I’ve wondered what size a Global 1940 mapboard would be if it was scaled up in size to allow HBG’s 3.5" roundel-themed beverage coasters (http://www.historicalboardgaming.com/HBG-60-pt-Beverage-Coasters_p_388.html) to be used as territorial control markers.

Quick napkin math says it would be in excess of 17 feet by 8 feet for the map.  :-o :-o :-o

[General 6 Stars]

@Navymule:

I can only imagine how awesome Global would be to play at this scale.

Ha ha ha if only I had the money and room I definitely make it happen but with a different map.

IL didnt you say you know or saw a picture of people war gaming on a banquet room floor or bigger and the guys would make attack and defend shots from many feet away for naval battles ?

[CWO Marc]

@Navymule:

Quick napkin math says it would be in excess of 17 feet by 8 feet for the map.

Impressive!  Thanks for the back-of-the-envelope calculations.

[CWO Marc]

@SS:

IL didnt you say you know or saw a picture of people war gaming on a banquet room floor or bigger and the guys would make attack and defend shots from many feet away for naval battles ?

This is probably a reference to Fletcher Pratt’s naval wargame, which was popular for a while in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  It was played with small scale warships carved out of soft wood (Pratt would hold “whittling parties” in which wood-carving enthusists would turn out entire fleets).  They’d be deployed on the floors of rented hotel ballrooms, and operated by teams of players in their socks (to avoid accidentally crushing the ships with misplaced shoe steps).  Ships were allowed to fire imaginary shells (and torpedoes) whose range was proportionate to the scaled-down range of the real guns carried by the real ships on which they were modeled (based, I think, on the figures given in Jane’s Fighting Ships).  Players would write down their firing orders based on a visual estimate of how far away on the ballroom floor the target ship was; Pratt’s umpires would then measure out the specified range with tape measures and mark the landing spot of the shells by using upside-down golf tees to represent shell splashes.  Hits would be translated into damage which was cumulatively deducted from the target ship’s damage-tracking card (whose numbers were based on a complicated formula which took armour and other factors into consideration); when the deductions eventually reduced the ship to zero points, it was considered sunk.  The overall system was very realistic in some ways (notably the target-ranging aspect) but hopelessly arbitrary in others because it treated ships as homogeneous lumps of amalgamated fighting attributes whose effectiveness was always degraded in a predictable, linear way from 100% down to 0%.  As was spectacularly demonstrated by HMS Hood, which was blown apart after six minutes of combat with the Bismark, naval slugging matches between battleships don’t necessarily progress in predictable, linear ways.  Still, the game must have been great fun; it was roughly a ballroom-sized counterpart of A&A Naval Miniatures, though with a completely different combat system.

[General 6 Stars]

Then perhaps it was you instead CWO.
Thanks for the reply.

[CWO Marc]

@SS:

Then perhaps it was you instead CWO.
Thanks for the reply.

My pleasure.  I’ve heard that, ironically enough, the economic circumstances of the Great Depression were a factor which made this game possible on such a grand scale because it was relatively cheap at the time to rent a hotel ballroom for an evening.  Also, the increasing international military tensions of the late 1930s (and the increases in naval construction of the period) stimulated interest in military and naval matters among the general population of the U.S., as did the actual outbreak of war in Europe in 1939.  Pratt once claimed that one of his gaming sessions had correctly predicted that three British cruisers could defeat a German pocket battleship, which ended up happening in real life in December 1939 at the Battle of the River Plate…but given how arbitrary his combat system was, my guess is that this may just have been a case of arriving at the right answer for the wrong reasons.

[Imperious Leader]

IL didnt you say you know or saw a picture of people war gaming on a banquet room floor or bigger and the guys would make attack and defend shots from many feet away for naval battles ?

Well sorta of. They would roll a huge d12 for atomic bomb hits and people were going bonkers. That was for The War Game: World War Two