When I say that I am a gamer, I consider that to mean I enjoy games in all formats.  Video games take up the bulk of my time, but I will gladly plop down at a poker table, or spend some time shouting for sheep in Settlers of Catan.  Heck, I’ll even rock the shit out of a round of Twenty Questions while cruising down the PA Turnpike. Over the years, though, one board game in particular has occupied a lot more of my time than almost any other one: Axis & Allies.

I was first introduced to A&A when I was in the eighth grade.  Up to that point in my life, most of my board game experience was led by games like Monopoly and Scrabble.  A&A, in comparison, was a beast of a different nature.  I was immediately grabbed by the sheer number and variety of pieces – I was a thirteen-year-old kid after all – and how, once set up on the board, they really gave the game an epic sense of scale.

Silly Russia… always forgetting to guard its capital

For those not familiar with it, Axis & Allies is, as you might guess from the name, a World War II strategy game.  Five players take the roles of the 5 main powers: US, Germany, UK, Japan, and Russia.  The Allies are allied with each other, and the Axis are all buddy-buddy. The object of the game is for one side to take two of the capitals of the other side. Players take turns buying units, attacking territories, and investing in technology.  The combat system is pretty simple, with each unit having an attack value that you roll against on a single d6.  The tech system is equally easy, with 6 available technologies you make attempts at rolling at by spending part of your country’s income.

Though the rules are simple, the gameplay itself is (at least, it seemed to us at the time) quite rich.  Each country has to make delicate strategic decisions about where to strike the enemy and when, what territories to hold and which ones to let go, and how and when to help your allies.

My friends and I played Axis & Allies a lot.  I mean, really a lot.  We would spend hours upon hours setting up the game, holding intricate strategy sessions with our allies, and cursing at the laws of probability.  The thing is, the more we played, the more we began to realize we had sort of drained the game of options.  Ultimately, after so many games, it seemed to us that there were only so many viable strategies for each side, and we’d seen them all.  Of course, when you really love something, you’re willing to find a way to make it work, and that’s what we did with A&A.

First we decided to play free-for-all, with no allies at all. This, of course, didn’t work, since the game was not balanced for such play.  To make up for that, we decided to play Risk-style, with each player picking their own territories instead of the pre-assigned historical ones.  This actually worked well for a while, but the more we played in that fashion, the more we began to feel that the regular gameboard just wasn’t up to snuff for such play.  N. America was a mere 5 territories, making it more or less useless, and certain other proper WWII-based choices seemed in need of improvement.

So, during one lazy college summer, I found an old table in my parent’s basement, and I decided to take a crack at designing a larger, better board.  I took the original game board, the maps from the Pacific and European versions, and my own feelings as to how some things should be and mushed them all together. After a few late nights of drawing and painting, I had a finished version.

Our first few play-throughs on the “big board”, as we called it, went pretty well.  Again, though, the more we played, the more we felt like something wasn’t quite right.  Now that the board had gotten even bigger and grander, suddenly the basic game rules seemed not quite epic enough.  The first thing we decided to do was to shift the combat system to a d12, thus allowing a larger spread between the abilities of the different units.  Then we decided to add resources and improved economics.  Then we decided to add a multi-tiered research system.

Around the time we added the espionage system, with it’s off-the-board spy units and research-stealing potential, we realized we’d taken things a little too far.  The core of the game that we so loved had become lost in our vast array of new rules.  After that, we didn’t play for a good long while, and the big board sat and gathered dust.

A few years after that, I found myself down in my parent’s basement again, staring at the board where I had left it tucked away in a corner.  Ideas began running through my head about changes I could make, and before I knew it, I was at Home Depot buying an even larger piece of plywood and breaking out my paints.  Thus a new Big Board was born, and with a return to the basic rules of days of old, we dove back into the world of A&A.

What you don’t see in this picture is the King of America off the left, building his army to destroy us all.

It’s been a few years since then, and though we don’t get to play nearly as often as we used to, we still continued to tweak the rules each time, slowly coming up with faster and fairer ways to play.  A marathon session a few weeks ago under our newest revised rules was a blast for everyone, and even though the King of America ended up besting us all, it was well worth it.

I’ve just finished designing the latest update to the Big Board, this time opting to print it out at 6′ x 3′ on a large format printer (something my wife appreciates much more than keeping a huge slab of plywood under the bed), and the newest rules are ready to roll.  We’ll play again soon, and no doubt we’ll come up with a few more changes, but that’s just part of our love of the game.

Our homebrewed Country Cards – now with airlifting!

Sure, what we play now bears only a passing resemblance to the original Axis & Allies, but we wouldn’t be at this point if it weren’t for that army of plastic tanks rolling out of Germany so many years ago.  I think it is one of the greatest aspects of gaming, in all its forms, that we can take the games we love and continue to change them in our own ways after so many years.  Be it through modding or map making or making up crazy super-powers rules for Monopoly, gamers embrace their hobby in a way most people don’t even realize, and that, I’d say, is a wonderful thing.

That soldier in the foreground?  He sat in Madagascar the entire damn game.  What a sweet gig.