The only figure I can quote off the top of my head with complete confidence about its accuracy is the number of A&A games of which I own just a single copy: two titles, specifically Guadalcanal and Zombies. For every other A&A game I own multiple copies, ranging from a low of two copies (in the case of Bulge and of the old Milton Bradley edition) to a high of “I stopped counting when I went over six copies” in the case of 1941. For the past decade or so I’ve typically bought at least three copies of every new A&A game during the week following their initial release (one copy from each of three local hobby shops, in a “support your local merchants” spirit), and I typically take advantage of annual Boxing Day specials to buy myself an extra copy of an in-print A&A game, whose choice varies from year to year; last year, it was 1942 second edition. My favourites of the bunch are the 1940 games, which I always buy in Europe + Pacific pairs: I have three (or is it four?) copies of the first edition, and I have four (or is it three?) copies of the second edition; in retrospect, I wish I had grabbed more copies of the first edition when it was in print because I like its map board better, and because its unique grey-coloured, British-design ANZAC sculpts were replaced by ANZAC-specific designs in the second edition. I’ll also sometimes, as a niche purchase, order online a second-hand copy of an out-of-print A&A game, but I don’t do this very often.
All of this is very much what the military would call “in excess of requirements” from a conventional perspective, but as an A&A sculpt collector I don’t see it quite from the angle of conventional requirements. For one thing, I like the fact that having multiple copies of multiple games, ranging across the publication history of A&A, provides a vast range of variant shapes, colours and shades for the sculpts, with the differences ranging from the trivial (e.g., the hatch shape on the turret of the American Sherman tank) to “so-flagrant-that-it-qualifies-as-a-new-unit” situations (e.g. the two versions of the German 88 AAA gun and the Stuka dive bomber, which actually served [incorrectly] as field artillery and fighter units in the older games). And I’m intrigued by the fact that accumulating so many sculpts produces wildly different frequency-distribution statistics: at one extreme I have huge quantities of US infantry sculpts (which are present in every A&A game ever made), while at the other extreme I only have small numbers of pieces which are unique to certain out-of-print games (like the green and orange generic AAA guns from Guadalcanal).
