Hi, just joined the website, but I have been playing A+A for a long time. My friends and I played with our own rules, but they were all even balanced for the most part. And ohhh boy did we play! Did all of you get the dreams? I swear some nights I would have these dreams like “I had three tanks, 5 guys, and 2 fighters….”, replaying these battle sequences in my dream!
We used 8 sided dice, 18 different units not counting artillery, AA gun or IC, 3 different Tech charts with 8 techs each. We had Auto buy which were free units at the star of your turn and Capital Surplus which was a roll at the end of your turn, if you get a good roll then you get a free piece. We used the Cards of War, which is a deck of cards that I made which help on offense, defense and misc situations. And of course we played on a home made map.
Before Artillery was introduced in the AA Europe Expansion I think, my friends and I had a custom piece called an Artillery that was different than the official rules when they came out. It all started with Germany…how times has an Axis player faced endless UK and American transports just carting dudes in. And how many times has there been a wall of Russian troops in Karilea? So I came up with an Artillery…which was an AA gun with a country marker under it. And it was ruled like a typical AA gun…only one per territory, one on a transport…etc. but the special thing about the Artillery was that it rolled one die for every defending unit, and hits on a roll of a one. That’s right…it cost 10 bucks and moved one space and had a range of 2 spaces. If that isn’t strong enough it could also be used to attack naval units! As long as a fighter or bomber attack the boats also, an Artillery or two (if in range) could be used as well. So if UK had 5 transports and a battleship, Germany could attack that fleet with 1 fighter and 2 artillerys. The artillerys would roll 12 dice total! Oh yeah, they only fire once per battle.
But in time the aritllerys got used and abused, we even made a new tech called Long Range Artillery to make it really crazy. Another tech we had was Gunboat Technology, which let transports holding an AA gun or an Artillery and fire then at land or air pieces. Then another tech we had was Defensive Artillery which meant if you attacked one of my properties and I had an artillery in it, then before you rolled your attack my artillery would first attack you and roll one die for each attacking unit you had. Any ones that I roll will eliminate one attacking unit. That was a pretty cool, but not very reliable tech.
I played it for years and loved it. I made many many maps, ordered countless extra units. One of the custom units we had was a Chinook. It carried one Infantry 5 spaces, it attacked at a 2 and defended at a 5, but that is using an 8 sided die. I made it by cutting the props off of the choppers (special ordered with other pieces)… then I would cut a carrier in half and trim the edges down, then I would glue the chopper blades to the top sides of the destoyer piece and make a nice Chinook with it.
So many good memories with it, I have never played the revised, updated or any other expansion, but I am putting the 50th edition one on the Xmas list for sure! Thanks for reading!
But I haven’t played it in years, and my stuff is in a storage place in New Jersey, so I don’t have access to all of my custom rules and new pieces.
