Axis & Allies Team Cup 2024 Discussion and Planning

@djensen

Wow, you’re asking me? Cool!

Bird’s eye view first -

• Getting players to play multiple versions of A&A - love it
• Getting players to meet other players not necessarily of their own choosing to team up - love it
• Getting players to meet personally and play on an actual board - love it (but my opponents better allow me to bring a battle calc with 😬)
• Rotating squads of players who could maybe be switched up between rounds and stuff? - love it

I guess this is why we keep you around, Dave 😂

January’s a great month since it’s the first of the year. Did you make a new year’s resolution to engage A&A.org people more?

Please move forward with this idea, because it’s great. Start the infantry marching.
I’ll help facilitate things in any way that I can (except I don’t want to book hotels for people, they should do that themselves).

Love the idea of a World Cup, looking forward to hopefully participating too!

@djensen

Sounds great sign me up

I’ve actually been working on a similar idea involving getting something resembling an “official” tournament system set up by Renegade at the various board game/hobby conventions they (probably) attend across the US/EU. I tried fishing for support for Renegade but got nothing back from them on my own. Shoot me a DM if you have time or want to exchange ideas. I can post it here instead but I don’t want to derail this thread with a wall of text.

@DoManMacgee

Please derail :) Can’t see your ideas otherwise :)

@djensen Thanks man. If you ever want to try pitching your idea to Renegade and need a point of contact DM me. I have contact info for their Organized Play director and you (as the owner of this site) probably have a much better shot of getting a response back from him than I did as just some random guy on the internet.

As for your plan here, since I never properly replied to it:

• Overall, I like this idea a lot, so don’t take any of my remarks below the wrong way of course.

• Have you considered forcing 1v1 instead of teams to increase the overall participant count? A headline saying “An Axis and Allies League with over 50 participants” would probably look better to onlookers/outsiders than saying “An Axis and Allies League with over 20 teams”.

• Online play itself is great since we already have the PBEM sub-forum on here with a community from all over the world, but it may also be good to have local events (such as the ones hosted by the people you CC’d + other known tournament organizers like @Young-Grasshopper, Smorey Swamp, etc.). I understand that results from live tournaments wouldn’t quite vibe with the idea of a “League” (where folks play one another on a regularly scheduled basis similar to a “regular season” in most sports), but encouraging the community to actually attend tournaments would do wonders for the franchise as a whole. There would definitely be some way to make it work out, like your idea of “bonus league points” relative to how well you performed at the actual tournament.

• If Greg would give his blessing, Gen Con would probably be an ideal location for a Final Tournament with the top X (4 or 8, probably depending on how many people actually sign up for this hypothetical league) Players competing for the championship. Renegade already chose Gen Con as the location of the inaugural World Championship last year, so keeping that tradition going may be beneficial. However, depending on the geographic location of the people who actually make the finals, it might also make sense to hold the finals in a location that’s agreeable to everyone (for example, if 2 West Coast guys + 2 Canadians from Vancouver/BC make the finals, it’d probably be smarter to keep the finals in somewhere like Washington State so travel expenses don’t get out of control).

Really liking your idea though. Sorry it took me a bit to formulate my thoughts on things and also sorry for bogging down your thread with my stuff yesterday.

@djensen

I’m sorry I can’t help setting it up, but know that I support your idea and will participate.

Hi Dave,

this sounds like a great initiative. I’ve created a account here to follow the progress. Considering the geographic spread of the players, the time commitment, and the reliability of people in these modern times, I think it’d be best to do teams of 1 - 3 and certainly online.

Best Regards from Germany

@djensen I love this idea! But as I have said, there are some holes in this. Many players have house rules not everyone agrees with. If this is the case, some (newer) players who have only played the base game could pair with players who play heavily modded versions, like @The-Captain . Also, can we make 1941 not allowed? It’s the most basic and unfun of any game. That’s my two cents.

@Nuts

I like 1941. It’s basic, sure, and I rarely play it now, but that’s what I started playing the entire franchise on, and I wanna use that knowledge and experience.

@SuperbattleshipYamato Yeah. To be honest, I have really only played it once.

@djensen If teams are something you’re unwilling to negotiate on, what is your provisional list of “allowed” games? There are many A&A games out there which range in both “official-ness” (i.e. “mainline” games like Classic Vs. “spin-offs” like D-Day) and overall value and perceived balance (i.e. most users on here prefer G40, balance notwithstanding, while games like Zombies and 41 are pretty much universally derided).

@DoManMacgee I agree with you. Some consider Global War 1936-45 an A&A game. I’m not saying that it can’t be considered one, but if we’re only using mainline games, does it count? After all, it’s not manufactured by Hasbro, who holds the rights, or Renegade, who manufactures the game currently.

@djensen Why are we not including both d-day and bulge? I suppose it would make sense as many only have d-day and bulge deserves love.

@djensen

Why only D-Day or Bulge? Why not both?