Color of the Italian pieces in Anniversary (2017)?

I’m not at home right now, so I can’t give an answer that’s specific to the editions you’re asking about, but I do know that my sculpt collection (which blends together all the editions of A&A, and divides them in ways that aren’t based on provenance) includes two shades of Italian units, one being slightly darker than the other, with the difference being sufficiently significant that I’ve put them in separate storage boxes.  A&A sculpts do vary in shade sometimes from printing to printing of the same game, and it’s not unusual for infantry sculpts as a group to vary slightly in shade from equipment sculpts as a group.  I know for example that I have two different shades of 1940 German sculpts, both black but one slightly more greyish than the other.  And don’t get me started on the American sculpts: my Global 1940 US sculpts are in two shades of green (one slightly yellowish), and the US infantry sculpts that I have from all the different games fall into about a dozen different shades of green (including the intentionally-different dark green Marine units from the old Pacific game).  To make matters worse, some of these shades of green look identical under incandescent light (which is reddish) but different under fluorescent light (which is greenish), or vice-versa.

Fortunately, I am what you might call an entitled player. I have a copy of A&A 50th Anniversary Edition (AA50), A&A Europe '40 (E40.1), A&A Europe '40 Second Edition  (E40.2), and the new A&A Anniversary Edition (NAAA).

So, for you, I went down stairs and pulled the Italians out of each box and compared a selection of units (infantry, tank, battleship, and bomber) from each collection. The following are my observations, after review under compact fluorescent lights:

Infantry - all four looked to me to be the same shade of brown. This trend would not continue.

Tank - The AA50 and the E40.1 tanks seemed to be the same shade, the E40.2 tank was a lighter shade, and the NAAA tank was of a shade in between the E40.1 and the E40.2, ever so slightly favoring the E40.1 shade.

Battleship - The AA50, E40.1, and NAAA battleships seemed to be the same shade with the E40.2 battleship seen as a lighter shade.

Bomber - The AA50 and the E40.1 bombers seemed to be the same shade, the E40.2 tank was a lighter shade, and the NAAA tank was of a shade in between the E40.1 and the E40.2, and in this case were clearly closer to the shade of the E40.1 bomber.

So, to answer your question:“Do the new Italian pieces match the color used in Europe 1940 2nd Edition?  Or are they in the darker shade used in 1st Ed?”, in my eyes, the new Italian pieces in the 2017 reprint of A&A Anniversary are much closer, but not always identical, to the darker shade used in A&A Europe 40.1.

Different types of lighting, different production runs of E40.1 and E40.2, different levels of vision (no color blindness but corrected with glasses to 20/20), et cetera…

-Midnight_Reaper

@AlphaKappa:

That is so helpful!  Thank you for the analysis!

It was my pleasure. A chance to pull out my games and admire them? If I must…  :-D

@AlphaKappa:

It’s too bad Avalon Hill didn’t print the new Anniversary Edition in the same colors as Europe '40 Second Edition.  I really like the lighter shade of those Italian pieces because they’re easier to distinguish from Soviet red-brown.

To be fair to Hasbro/WotC/Avalon Hill, all they promised was a re-print. And to a large degree, that is what the New A&A Anniversary edition was: a straight up re-print of the original go at things. Were there differences between the two prints? Of course there were. Were all of those changes for the better? I don’t think so, no. I especially wish they had kept the US F6F Hellcat fighters but instead we got more P-38 Lightnings. But overall, it was probably as faithful as they could do and a long shot better than either 1) not doing it at all (what a pity that would have been) or 2) just phoning it in and wholesale dumping all of the right pieces from A&A 42 and A&A Europe 40.1 Italy.

Instead, we got the original Anniversary Edition Italian tank, the M14/41. We got the Italian brown Japanese Betty bombers and Type 92 Howitzers (artillery). And they put them into a shade about as close as to the shade of the original Anniversary Edition Italians as they were going to get from two print runs separated by 9 years. And that meant that we got a bunch of Italian brown German ships and fighters. But we got a re-print of a game I didn’t think was ever coming back.

And for that, I don’t mind dark brown Italians. Even if I would have rather gotten the F6Fs and the Maroon UK Country class cruisers, I’m happy with what we did get.

-Midnight_Reaper