Newbie Experiences!

Heck, I’ve done that lots of times, not from inexperience, just too much beer!

We had a “roll for moves phase”  I cant even explain how that worked now, but you could sail around the world in one turn.  They need to rethink how the write the rules when there are so many noob mistakes that get made on the 1st or 2nd games they play

my newbie experiences are going on in my game versus Switch.

actually my first axis experience I was given the command of Japan.  I was overwhelmed by the units and map that I did not bother to concentrate on what was going on it Europe.  The German player had to leave so I took over.  My first order of business was to purchase a battleship to restore the navy.  Needless to say, that did not go over to well.  The ship was sunk, Germany was invaded by England that turn and the game was over.

My opponent was a good sport (after he was a bragging bad sport) and showed me where to buy it.  I learned and away we went.

Hehe, the first time i ever played A&A i played the original version, it was a couple of years ago so the game was pretty old, but they hadnt come out with the newer ones yet. My friend got it for his birthday or something and i had been bugging him to play for a long time, we finally did but instead of playing with all newbies, we went out and got three other friends who had ALL played before. To add to our troubles, these three told us the rules… but they were not even close to being right. It was a good game for everybody but the guy who was Russia (that was me) he got destroyed by the most experianced played who “generously” opted to be Germany.
  To add to my troubles the rules we played by were bad for an experianced guy such as my self. (the units you bought were placed on the board and then your turn started) hehe, i got destroyed… it was awesome. :)

@M36:

We didnt even use ICs my first game. :oops: :lol: Man that was a riot.

Yeah, dude! first time I played A&A I didn´t have an opponent to play against. Moreover I didn´t use the map, just improvising. UK always won since I used some aditional infantry units that looked pretty cool, Red Devils I think! Beats me ;-)

Well, I haven’t even played a full game yet, but here’s my first taste of AA.

We set the board and I manage to find it says on the cardboard pieces where to place everything.

Then we notice that Germany is cramped, but then we look at Japan and laugh our heads off.

It’s Russia’s turn, so I explain you buy tech then units. He doesn’t tech and buys a tank and puts it into the loading thing and… That’s where we ended. We were confused as to how the attacking worked with the dices and all the special abilities.

My group doesn’t have a lot of patience, so we stuffed the game back into the box and proceeded with Xbox 360. If video games are pricey, at least they require less maintenance.

I think I get the gist of the game, but little things like how it says place a boat in Britain, yet there’s 4 seas surrounding it, or if we can choose what units we want to commit rather than all in an attack, or why you would move planes back and forth bother us.

It’s really a step up from Risk 2210, which we are used to. I’m not a fast learner, so reading from a book is worse than from being taught from another player.

I had to reply here, because I remember all the mistakes that me and my friends made the first few times we played…
In the beginning we also thought it was free for all. And, because the first few times we played we didn’t have the rulebook (in classic), we thought that the dice were for the movement, so we would move our units with the dice. We even bought units, and then sold them and bought them in another place…

Then, we learned how to play better, but we still made big mistakes. We made kamikazee attacks with planes, or we allowed them to land anywhere. We landed Bombers on carriers. We mixed land and water battles… It was so mixed up…!

@trihero:

First game, we allowed armor(edit- all units for that matter) to attack ships off shore.

You win.

I concur, that is up there.

I never had problems like any of those. I had actually played a counters and hexes war game (an intro one) prior to my first game of A&A. A&A seemed comparitively simple. Between the battle board and the cards it almost explains itself. But then I read the rule book. They gave me US and the rules and said “Read this and pay attention. You should be okay when we get to you.”

Now it took some time to gain competency with all the rules and playing well. Could still use some more competency at playing well.

This is more of a classic thing, but from the first game I was subjected to house rules…every power had it’s own thing.

Russia:  2 IPC infantry from the first round
Germany:  Subs hit on a 4 or less on attack and could retreat from combat before shots were first fired; armor ATT/DEF at a 3
England: AA hit on a 3 or less
Japan: BBs took 3 hits to sink (8 IPC to fix each hit); fighters could crash into unit of choice for an auto-kill, no defense shots
USA: Could rebuy any destroyed mechanized unit at 2/3rds original cost (rounded down.)  Destroyed Armor: 2 IPC to rebuild.  Destroyed BB, 16 IPC to rebuild.  Destroyed AC 10 IPC to rebuild. Destroyed Fighter 8 IPC to rebuild, you get the idea.

Needless to say, no one ever heard of bidding before. :)

I always played Germany when we began to play: my strat was to only buy tanks, and if uk and usa were pressing too hard after some round, I built subs and… more tanks!

By that time, Russia was buying bombers and tanks, UK was going all out on Ic and destroyer (hey, Germany had subs), and Japan was only fighting USA on the water.

We were always screwed up with planes when there were islands and AC…

Here is one I am sure that every Revised player will appreciate…

My first game of Revised ever (and the archive is still on these boards…)
All-out German attack on Caucuses.

I think y’all can appreciate how badly THAT went :-)

Wow, I had a really different first experience. We had a group of 5 people raring to go, but we had to wait till the weekend. We’d already pre-decided the teams, and my teammate and I (I was Japan, he was Axis) stayed up for hours the night before the match planning out our strategy. We searched the rules, and set up the board and played out a mock run of the first turn. It’s scary how close to forum convention we came actually. Our first turn strategy was “Kill the allied navy.” and we basically succeeded. We were all lousy at logistics, being a first game, but the Axis had the ships already, so we had a clear advantage. Axis took over every Allied capitol. In terms of mistakes, I think we only make one big one. We didn’t know there were already fighters on the carriers at the beginning of round 1. WOOOOOOOPS! Mostly screwed me in hindsight, but that’s okay.

In my first game I played Russia (playing 2nd ed)
I was at first dismayed to see that all targets seemed well defended.
Then I saw it…
Sinkiang!

I attacked Sinkiang on R1, and took it.
By UK1, the tournament organizer comes, over, glances at our table and shouts:
“What the hell does a Russian armor & control marker do in Sinkiang!
After I haphazardly explain, he again proclaims, over the entire convention hall, at the top of his lungs:
“All right everybody, listen up! The game is played as the Allies vs the Axis! This is not a free-for-all!”

God, that was an embarrassing moment, if there ever was one. :-D

Dude, that’s hilarious.

The tournament was played w/o bids. That would have made the game totally lopsided of course. Therefore – all newbies were given the Allies. All experienced players were given the Axis.

The Japanese player began saying something when I shoved my units into Sinkiang, but he was quickly hushed by the German.  :-D
Do I have to say that we lost the game??

Submarines as Russia  :lol:

The first time I played A&A there was five of us, and only two of us had played before.  I played as Britain and on Germany’s first turn he attacked my battleship outside Gibraltar with four fighters and his submarine.  And my battleship sunk everything with only taking one hit from the submarine in the first round.  :evil:

The Soviet Player just huddled in his terrorities, and when the United States player and I wanted him to attack, he would respond, ‘no my units will die.’  The German player sunk the British fleet turn three with heavy bombers.  I bought Rockets and traded IPC with Germany using my bombers versus his heavy bombers.  The American player couldn’t dedide whether he wanted to attack Germany or Japan.  The Japanese player matched the United States fleet in the Pacific.  We conceded, even though we still had the advantage…

I have no idea what version it was.  A friend of mine, Kurt, invited me over to play while he was downloading something over his 14.4 modem off of some ftp server somewhere.  Anyway, he was Axis and I was Allies.  I played the Russians by buying a mix of things.  I know I bought  fighters, not sure on how many tanks or infantry.  I played them aggressive.  Always attacking towards Germany.  I was not sure what to do with England or America so I bought tech and bombers.  eventually, both had Heavy Bombers and Long Range Aircraft and I kept doing Strategic Bombing Runs against Berlin.  The tide started to turn at that point because I would blast away most of his income leaving him a few IPC’s for a handful of infantry.  I completely ignored anything that was not Europe.  I eventually lost due to the Magic 84 rule, I had forgotten about it, because I just let the axis control all of Africa and most of Asia.  That actually made me mad because I was sure I could have cracked into Berlin within a turn or two.  :x  I was practically knocking on the door with huge stacks of Russian units and I had a ton of US & UK bombers.  That and I had some amazing early rolls, I think.  He was a good sport about it and pointed out that if I had done Torch with the US I could have avoided it for a bit longer and probably would have won.  I literally had not touched/moved a single US or UK land unit the whole game.