Started playing w/ my brothers when I was 13 (1976) We actually took a 4’x8’ piece of plywood and painted a blown-up version of the board on it. We spent a few weeks in Dads workshop making little wooden playing pieces and painting them. It was quite fun. We set it up on the ping-pong table and spent weeks battling. We came up w/ a few variations on the rules, map and unit movements. The one I remember quite well is stealth subs! We would start of w/ our subs in the proper starting sz’s, but we would “submerge” the subs when moving them so our opponets did not know where they were until they “surfaced”. We’d plot the moves on paper so we could prove where they moved to and from. It was quite fun to have an opponet move his fleet into a SZ that was occupied by 4 or so submerged subs. The subs would “surface”, in some cases stopping the opponents full movement, take a few hits and watch the subs submerge. Great fun and a nice twist to the game.
That sounds like a great twist, I’ll have to try it sometime.
I was 14ish when I first played a game. All of us were newbies.
My dad was UK and USA and built a ton of bbs to bombard me to pieces. USSR built a ton of infantry and stacked moscow heavily and never moved out of it. I think he had over 60 infantry when the game ended, at least double whatever was left on the board, combined! I was able to conquer all of Africa with one lone Jap infantry which eventually was transported over to europe to help save berlin. Japan also invested in an airforce to bomb the massive allied fleet. Germany quickly spread out due to moscow simply falling back. But I was never able to mount a serious offensive vs moscow. eventually it was all I could do to hold onto europe because of the massive bb fleets both USA and UK sported. And still USSR held to their defenses and never switched to offensive mode. Ahh, that innocence of noobs.
