Do people still play global?

[Cow]

I seem to lose interest in global, pretty much as soon as I sit down, by the time mid-late game comes up I am bored.

I think it is because it takes so long before a battle for moscow, germany, india, or something to come up. Like aa50 you pretty much bound to see berlin or moscow within the first 10 rounds… usually 7 or 8 if you are aggressive (and the game ends not keeps going). A whole bunch of skirmishes that matter occur between rounds as well.

Global always breaks down a certain way and it takes forever, especially competitive games (casual games you can just throw pieces around and not really care and then peace out).

The worst opponents are ones that do not go to war until round 3. Even in early war scenarios there is a finite amount of battles and there is no recovery if one side gets polarized dice results. I have seen germany get screwed round 1 doing the same old thing, but unlike AA50 you have no more fun, your fun is done (aa50 you can get super screwed on g1 and still manage to just shove everything at caucasus, win or lose the game right there).

I think I just don’t have patience anymore to see how things develop. Every time I play global, I just want to roll some dice and get it over with.

[Witt]

I only play a few games a year, so I will not bore of it for a while.
Can’t you play some of your old games and come back to it in 6 months?

[vonLettowVorbeck1914]

If you’re bored, mix up the techs/tech system, use National Advantages, try Oztea’s 1941 setup. There’s lots to do to mix it up. If it’s not perfectly balanced, so what? Changing things up adds many variables and makes it hard to find a
broken strategy.

[General 6 Stars]

Thats why I like to play my 2 advanced games.

[Fortress]

I would say so… And on the League page there’s a poll between G40 League play and AA50-41 League play and G40 had an early lead.

I never see Moscow get attacked after G10 - I don’t know what kind of foot-dragging games you’ve been seeing… India usually gets attacked by J3/J4 unless they’re so neutered that Japan doesn’t even care about them anymore. Allies can be landing and holding in Africa/Europe as early as 7-8. Africa always seems to be going back and forth if people recognize its importance.

So… I just don’t get how you can be bored. Maybe change up opponents? Maybe you’re seeing too much of the exact gameplay from the same people? Maybe you’re bored because you play the same way every time? If the goal is some combination of fun and winning, choosing a slightly sub-optimal strategy won’t kill you. For instance, I got great rolls G1 in a current game. G3 Sealion was a slam dunk. I didn’t feel like it, though. I wanted a different game. So I did a G3 Barb with a J3 capture of India. Point is, if you’re bored maybe do something a little different at the start and follow the butterfly effect.

Maybe the secret is to play more games and not fewer? I have 4 games of G40 going at once right now. 5-6 might be my limit? But I’m having a blast. Yeah, I probably waste a little time every turn re-familiarizing myself with what board I’m looking at. Yeah, I probably made a couple errors I wouldn’t make if I was 100% concentrating on 1 game. I don’t care; I’m having fun.

[Canuck12]

@ Fortress

Agreed. Each game is different. I guess everyone has a different attention span but to be honest, its the smaller games that get boring for me. Global goes in so many different directions every time, every mini-theatre is like a game in and of itself. The Med, the Baltic, China, Africa the Mid-east, the Atlantic. Each one contains as many tactical and strategic choices as a whole game. So what if there’s no battle for Moscow on 10? You have your fun elsewhere. And sometimes there is no battle for Moscow at all!. My current game will end without Berlin, Rome or Moscow falling: Cool! All the more interesting. That’s why I find Anniversary to get a little boring sometimes. Japan gets huge, Germany takes Moscow before the allies gain a foothold or the allies take Berlin after wearing Germany down after landing in Europe every turn. Pretty scripted. Even the new 1942 game has more diversity than that!

Long live Global 1942!

If you cant go 10 rounds Cow better stick to 1941 or RISK! Leave global for the big-boys.

[Cow]

Excuse me? You will refer to me as Champ.

Russia can go down in 7 rounds, but it is still 3-4 more before germany can move into position for the europe win. Comes down to if japan is still around or not ie. if uk pacific is a second russia guarding the middle east.

The point is, global is boring. Most games just break down the same way and I want to fast forward button past rounds to see the conclusion and call it a day.

My attention span for a dice game is 3 rounds after that I am bored. LL 7 rounds then we got to save and continue later. Live games, I rather just play aa50 because global won’t get finished and it is too much hassle to write down where everything was (pictures don’t really tell you many chips you got under a stack very well).

I used to play a full game of global when it was fresh, even then it was lackluster.
~

AA50 is more like a race. Global is more like one side turtles up and tries to maintain position, maybe drop men to keep pressure off of russia, while the other side has fun until the fighters run out.

~
global just requires patience I do not have, when there are so many different forms of pleasure in this world.

[General 6 Stars]

Cow, have you looked into playing tigerman’s 1939 Global game? I have 2 advanced global 39 games and also have Tigerman’s game. Just haven’t got to that game yet. Whats nice is I have 3 global 39 games I can play and they have 10 times more stuff going on than Global 40. Great to have different kinds of things going on.

[Cow]

It seems aight.

[Zhukov44]

I think the argument you made applies to any A&A game.  Any game can get stratified and boring……until strategic innovators find a way to make it interesting again.

It seems reasonable to assume that Global’s historic faithfulness and tight VC conditions mean there are only a certain number of viable strats and outcomes, and that eventually the game will get stale.

However I find that the Pacific front in particular is extremely rich and there are lots of strategic avenues that have not been fully explored.  So I think we’re still a long way from ‘stale’.

One problem with Global is Allied players rarely bid high enough…so Axis often has the advantage all the way through.  But this is identical to what was happening when AA50 came out…eventually people find the right bid and the game gets more competitive.

here’s a file of a fun recent game where Europe Axis pulled off the win but Japan got badly beaten up by USA…  what to conclude… well I need to work on my late-game Japan play!  And Allies might need even more than a 20 bid to compete in a low luck match.

epic12rounder_europeaxiswins.tsvg

[Walhalla]

Sorry to bother but what is a bid ? and what is this tigerman’s 1939 Global game?
Thanks :)

[Witt]

Some people think the game(and others) are so biased towards the Axis they will only play the Allies if they are given help in the form of more units. The units are bought using the money that the bid, or auction, ends at. Some people will only play the Allies if they are given 20 IPCs to spend for example. Some bid up, others bid down.
It stops everyone wanting to play the Axis, which is more fun because of the initial attacking and euphoria of territorial gains and makes the Allies a more interesting side to play.
The 1939 game starts in 1939 and is much more complex and takes far more time to play. It had been designed by people here, not by Larry Harris, the designer of A&A.
I do not own it, but would love to.

[Spendo02]

Cow, perhaps you’ve got your comfortable scripted moves down that you’ve become bored replaying the same scripts over and over?

I’m not saying your scripts are not effective, but part of the game is likely learning the strategies then applying them.  At some point, we as gamers, find ways to break the game or find ways to make winning as consistent as possible.  Once that happens, we get bored - it happens to me almost all the time in NCAA football unless I play an opponent I’ve never played before.

Maybe its time to take a step back for a break as it obviously sounds like you’ve got the “I’ve figured it out, played it enough and now I’m burnt out” syndrome min/max gamers run into.

[gliven]

I’m playing a game where there are 3 sides, no national objectives. USA UK ANZAC vs Russia China Japan vs Germany Italy France.

UK is losing territories left right and center. Germany and Italy gets set back quite a bit by not having any NO’s but the starting advantage of more troops and France helping start to balance it out. India has no chance to survive against the combined Chinese and Japanese forces, Unless USA helps out fast.

I gave china the ability to make any units, also gave it a major factory in Kiangsu and a minor in Manchuria also made its capital Shanghai. setup is current 1940.2. Gave each side a combined bid of 50 IPC to spend as they please. No more than 2 units per territory added facilities included. Neutrals are invadable with no repercussions.

Turn order we played rock paper scissors to decided who went first. each side moves all forces at same time. I’m playing Germany, Italy, and France and i won so i went first. Then USA, UK, ANZAC went second.

Each country controls their own IPC amount and troop production. So Germany Italy and France move at the same time, but they still have to build in their own industrial complexes.

[Fortress]

Cow, I’m not sure why you changed your first post so thoroughly. It’s probably 95% changed from the post that you started the thread with. Why not just post a comment in line with everybody else’s comments so that everybody can see what the rest of us were responding to?

I was going to suggest that maybe your dislike for G40 and the way that you become quickly bored with a game that doesn’t move fast enough for you might have to do with your insistence on live games. If you played via forum you might be more willing to get involved in games that took longer to develop and you wouldn’t feel the need to play the same way every time, play only the ultra-aggressive style, and criticize everybody who doesn’t.

To answer your original question, which seems to have disappeared, it seems you are in the minority – the 2300+ and counting page views on the new thread for G40.2 FAQ seem to suggest that other people have plenty of interest in Global.

[Fortress]

Sorry, 3200+ page views and counting. My bad.

[Cow]

views tend to get counted multiple times on the site sometimes.

I did change my OP which is rare of me, but I feel it did not translate well.

[Walhalla]

@wittmann:

Some people think the game(and others) are so biased towards the Axis they will only play the Allies if they are given help in the form of more units. The units are bought using the money that the bid, or auction, ends at. Some people will only play the Allies if they are given 20 IPCs to spend for example. Some bid up, others bid down.
It stops everyone wanting to play the Axis, which is more fun because of the initial attacking and euphoria of territorial gains and makes the Allies a more interesting side to play.
The 1939 game starts in 1939 and is much more complex and takes far more time to play. It had been designed by people here, not by Larry Harris, the designer of A&A.
I do not own it, but would love to.

Oh ok, thanks… But let’ s say we start the game with a bid of 10 ICP for the allies. Does this mean 10 ICP for every Allied Nation?

[Witt]

The final bid is shared amongst them. Not each.
Tends to be UK naval units or sometimes a Fighter in Global.
Earlier games was Russian Inf or UK navy, often for the Med.

[Chicochico]

I played a global game this last weekend, we had a blast, and i took a ton of pictures of the board during the match. Took us 11 hours, 9 turns, and i won as the axis.

We played with no bids and no tech. Axis felt a little too strong, as usual.

So yes, people still play global :-D