Today is father’s day, and as always I am late to the party, but me and my brothers still want to give him a gift. So here is the situation: my father has always been an enthusiastic board game collector and player, especially the A&A franchise. Today, after first doing some research in which A&A game are out there, I checked the attic, and the only A&A games which he didn’t have were the new one of the first world war, and the 1941 edition, he even got the anniversary edition, which is quite special I noticed.
But here is the kicker even though my father isn’t even that old, (58 last I checked) the years haven’t been kind for him, and thus he isn’t able to play any regular long lasting game of A&A anymore. He know the traditional rules, like the order of each turn, and the attack and defence values of each unit, and most of their special abilities. But any new rule introduced by the specific game we would be playing, like kamikazes, researches, additional conditions to gain extra ics, etc, just won’t stick with him anymore. And besides that the game duration and size also have become very taxing for him. He can’t really focus for more than 1-2 hours, after that he needs quite some rest, and keeping track of large armies has also proven very difficult for him. So sadly the regular games of A&A which normally would already take 1-2 days to play are no longer feasible for him. Maybe I didn’t need to tell you this, but a bit of sympathy is always good when you want to request something from someone.
so when I found out about the existence of A&A 1941, I thought to myself: this is perfect for my dad; there are no additional rules besides the core, and the smaller board state makes it less straining for him to manage an army, and he didn’t even have 1941 yet. Later I found out that that probably is because the collectors value of it is rather… lackluster. This ties in with the request I am about to make. 1941 is precisely what my dad needs, but the lackluster quality of its contents makes it for a rather crappy gift in and of itself. So I want to upgrade it with new units, new stacking markers, maybe even a few additional dice, just about anything to make it the best right out of the box experience he could get out of this game.
TL;DR:
And in picking these is where I need your help, I have noticed that there is an site which sells additional figurines for A&A, (I forgot it’s address, but that’s nothing a quick google search can’t fix) and I know my dad would very much appreciate historical accurateness, and good quality in the figurines, but I myself don’t really have enough expertise in that are to know what would be best. Nor would I know how many I should buy, because by now I sure as hell know that the quantities that are included in the standard box aren’t enough. So if anyone could give me advice on which figurines would be best to buy, (considering both playability, historical accurateness, overall beauty and quality) and how many of them I need to buy, I would be ever grateful. My budget for this endeavour is at most 50 euro (excluding the € 20-30ish price of the game itself).