1941 and the IPC/Purchasing issue

What a sad lot you are! :roll: Stop retaining your posteriors and get a life! :-P

@Wolfshanze:

so (for me anyways) there’s absolutely no reason to hold onto my Mitsubishi Tiger Tanks… if anybody wanted them, they should have spoke up!

I wish I had.   :-D

I keep all of my A&A sculpts, which I think of as collectibles as much as playing units, and I deal with national incongruities via the sorting process for my collection.  About half of my A&A sculpts are sorted into nation-based trays that I regard as the primary units for each player power; this more or less corresponds to the Global 1940 Second Edition array of sculpts, plus any sculpts from other games which are identical to them in terms of basic design (e.g. a Spitfire), of current design version (e.g. the current flat-winged Spitfire, as opposed to the older uptilted-wing one) and of colour and shade (e.g. the current light-tan Spitfires).

Everything else gets sorted into auxiliary trays.  In terms of the 1941 tank sculpts, for example, the black German Tiger tanks and marroon Russian IS-2 tanks reside in a set of trays that could be described as “supplementary special units of particular nations, having the correct design and colour”.  The wrong-colour green, tan and orange 1941 tanks are in another set of trays that could be described as “current-design sculpts that are the right colour for a particular country but which are the wrong design for that nation.”  That’s actually a large number of trays because it’s not just the 1941 pieces that have that problem; for example there’s the French equipment pieces, which are a mixture of Russian and Anglo-American designs (or the mainstream non-British UK transport ship, or the maintream non-Russian USSR aircraft carrier, both of which I’ve replaced in the primary-units tray with their correct-nation 1941 counterparts).  I also have a tray of what I call “collector’s variants” sculpts, where I put oddities like the alternate-version Russian and German artillery sculpts.

Getting even further and further away from the primary trays, I have trays of 1940 American sculpts that are the right design and the right colour but the wrong shade (yellowish-green as opposed to medium green), and I have trays of older sculpts which are in obsolete older colours and/or which are older designs (like the “pre-refreshed” infantry sculpts that were used in the first few A&A games).  And then I have trays of statistical outliers like the 1914 sculpts and the generic equipment sculpts from the Milton Bradley edition of A&A.  (I also have quite a few trays of sculpts that aren’t official A&A pieces, like for instance the ones from HBG, but we won’t get into that.)

From a practical point of view, all of the above is unnecessarily complicated…but as I said, I view my A&A sculpts as collectible items, and it’s not unusual for collectors (of anything) to pay attention to the fine details of the multiple variations and subcategories of models that have been produced of whetever item they’re collecting.  Part of the payoff for this kind of obsessiveness is that a collector will take great satisfaction from owning a rare or unique version of something (like a coin with a minting error), even if a non-collector might miss the point completely (“What’s the big deal?  That’s just a nickel and these days a nickel is hardly worth anything”).

Well, what I’m going to do is add 1 IPC value to every territory. Course I’m not going to play it except to teach my younger siblings…

Quote from: Benito Mussolini on July 05, 2017, 02:15:43 pm
CAN’T WAIT FOR THE TIGERS!!!

Yes, Japanese Tiger Tanks are the best…

Let me rephrase: CAN"T WAIT TO PAINT THOSE JAPANESE TIGERS BLACK!!!

@Wolfshanze:

Did you read how CWO Marc organizes his units? I bet he uses a label gun (seen below) to annotate each of his unit bins with accurate descriptions.

Actually, I hand-write my box labels with a felt pen on peel-away sticky envelope labels, whose top edge I trim with scissors to make them fit the box edge where I need to apply them.  I don’t own an embossing gun.  (Nor do I have particularly neat handwriting, even though do I try to make an effort to make my handwritten labels look more or less decent.)  The box labels aren’t terribly complex; they say things like “USA-1” “USA-2” for multi-tray nations and “FRANCE” for single-tray nations. The boxes don’t even have flag labels on them (unlike the ones on your trays, which incidentally look quite nice).  Some of the trays aren’t yet labeled (they just have a handwritten note inside) because I’ve been too busy for a while to complete some of the sorting work…which is probably just as well, given that the Anniversary reprint allegedly contains new sculpts which may require a bit of rejiggering of the auxiliary trays.

I don’t fish either.  Never saw the point.  Though I’ve heard that this activity is somewhat popular among various folks here and there.

@Wolfshanze:

I was just “fishing” for an excuse to post that video… it’s damn funny.

The irony is that I use plastic tackle boxes as my sculpt storage trays.

Wow, you guys make me feel ashamed about the hundreds of A&A classic games that I have played with those "one shape fits all " units.  But, I get it….we have all come a long way since those “good old days”… I too find the punkin Orange Tigers a little unusual…but I will find a good use for them …if I live long enough.

@Loose:

But, I get it….we have all come a long way since those “good old days”…

We certainly have.  My collection includes several trays of those old cheap plastic Xeno clones of the original Milton Bradley A&A units, in a variety of colours, and to me they are a reminder of the Dark Ages, when the Xeno sculpts were more or less the only thing available to supplement the (at the time) small array of official A&A sculpts, for example in order to add extra countries like France.  By contrast, the number of official A&A sculpts available today is very large indeed.  (France even has two sets of official A&A sculpts nowadays: the ones from 1940 and the ones from 1914, which are virtually the same colour and which are useful for, let’s say distinguishing Free French / Vichy units.)

I appreciate everything you said, we are in the same boat. I got the gear…getting more time available, but like you finding folks in my area (Eastern Shore Maryland )  is the hardest part of the challenge.

So have we come up with a solution to the purchasing problem? Or do I just bin it all and teach my 9 year old 42.2 or 50? I’d love to make this version work as it would be great for a pub battle. I’m tempted to do the +1 to every territory.

@Variable:

So have we come up with a solution to the purchasing problem? Or do I just bin it all and teach my 9 year old 42.2 or 50? I’d love to make this version work as it would be great for a pub battle. I’m tempted to do the +1 to every territory.

IMHO, 1941 is more a learning tool to introduce people to the game than a staple of the series. Once someone has the basics down, you’d be better-off moving-on to either 1942.2 or the new Anniversary Edition, then you don’t have to worry about “fixing” the money issue in 1941.

@Nowhere:

@Variable:

So have we come up with a solution to the purchasing problem? Or do I just bin it all and teach my 9 year old 42.2 or 50? I’d love to make this version work as it would be great for a pub battle. I’m tempted to do the +1 to every territory.

IMHO, 1941 is more a learning tool to introduce people to the game than a staple of the series. Once someone has the basics down, you’d be better-off moving-on to either 1942.2 or the new Anniversary Edition, then you don’t have to worry about “fixing” the money issue in 1941.

Well, I agree with your assessment of the games and will do so with my son. But we don’t always have time for the larger games so I was looking for a way to get more purchasing power into a small quick game. I like the simplicity of this one over, say, Revised. It takes a lot of the “level 2” rules out which is great for him. But I want him to explore more complex buys.