ot Most complex game of all time

[Snake Eyes]

I remember an SPI football game. It took a friend and me four hours to play three downs.

However, my vote goes to ASL. You have to play it continually just to keep the rules fresh in your mind. Nothing matches its depth and breadth in the WWII tactical arena. It encompasses all fronts and all theaters. It has been evolving for over two decades and continues as a living and growing system, even now.

I see CM as its computer counterpart. CM has neither the depth or breadth of ASL yet, but I am looking to the future with great optimism.

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It is easy to be brave from a safe distance. -Aesop

[Private Pike]

My vote would have to go to ASL, great game but would usually take me a week of reading the rules before I could play (which is why is why i havent played it for a few years). Air War was another great game that comes second. I'll never forget the "displays (about 2 times A4 size)" with about 20 counters for each plane showing altitude, attitude, speed, weapons etc etc etc.I can remember replaying the final part of Top gun when I was at school.

[CaSCa]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Madmatt:

I really liked Yaquinto games and Marine 2002 and Ironclads are still long time favorites for me.

Madmatt

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Ironclads is way cool! It made a stab at simultaneous movement with pencil and paper. I still have it in the closet. Now if I remember right, didn't Yaquinto games have the double-thick counters? (They made even AH's counters seem as thin as a two dollar frozen pizza.) And I seem to remember that Yaquinto was bought out by a Battle-somebody'. Surely it wasn't a pre-dotcom 'Battlefront'?

[This message has been edited by CaSCa (edited 11-01-2000).]

[Medieval]

ASL. Period, end of story. But, its also the best WW2 game on the squad level known to man.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

C'mon you guys. Surely Campaign for North Africa takes the prize. There were even rules for the pasta supply requirements of the Italian army! I mean, how ludicrous can you get?

Just my .02c worth (sorry it's now .05c when converted to $AU)

Regards

Jim R.

[chrisl]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jadayne:

Awful Green Things!!!!! I never thought I'd meet anyone else that played that game. That was a hoot!

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Still have a copy at my mom's house.

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Slayer of the Original Cesspool Thread.

[Jeff Heidman]

ASL, in my experience. The most complex, and highest quality wargame ever done, period.

CM is great for different reasons (primarily that I do not have to devote an entire day to playing one scenario), but it still rather shallow compared to ASL.

Of course, the more fair comparison would be to comapre CM to the original Squad Leader (without COI, etc). In that case, CM is light years ahead of the first Squad Leader release in depth.

Anyone out there ever play Toon! ?

Jeff Heidman

[Echo]

Third Reich hands down. Be nice if they re-did it for the PC.

[Jeff Heidman]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Echo:

Third Reich hands down. Be nice if they re-did it for the PC. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

They did.

Jeff Heidman

[Maj. Bosco]

Anyone ever heard of "The Book of Lists"? There're a bunch of them. They're pretty cool. Anyway, I have on at home and it's got a list of the longest games. The ones that take the most time to setup finish etc... So, for complexity I'm not sure, but the longest game circa 1978 was a WWII war game that simulated the entire war in north africa and europe. Seriously. The map was somthing like 400 square feet. Thousands and thousands of counters. I'm at school right now, when I get home I'll look for it. It might sound familiar to one of the old wargamers here. According to the book there was never a game finished. Ever. Wish I could remember the name... Anyway. Not sure how complex the rules were but that's gotta be the longest.

[Maj. Bosco]

Oh, and D&D doesn't even rank compared to those other ones. Not even close.

[Phoenix]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Kestrel:

This is starting to make me feel old, but to set the record straight...

Air War was originally published by SPI. For its time, it was the most complex game on the market. It took a long time to become comfortable with the rules, but it remains to this day my favorite boardgame. Gaming a dogfight takes many, many times longer than the actual event. The hardest problem is finding an opponent willing to suffer through the process of learning it.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, that was it, SPI! Thanks. What a nightmare.

The other flight game by GDW was quite good fun. The ground attack version at least. Nowhere near as hard as Air War.

[Guy w/gun]

Why has no one mentioned the most complex and varying game of all? Chess!

I could go on for hours about why it is the most complex, but it should be obvious.

Size of scope and number of units don't nessarily make complexity.

[Sgt Steiner]

Hi all

my vote for most complex Boardgame (at least that I attempted) goes to AH Anzio with advanced rules.

AH Flight Leader comes a close second as I think it would be easier to fly an actual Jet ??

ASL is certainly complex but no more so than SL + all its supplements (GI Anvil Of Victory is essentially a Beta for ASL)

Aahh such nostalgia...........

Cheers

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Sgt Steiner

Belfast

NI UK

[Snake Eyes]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Guy w/gun:

Why has no one mentioned the most complex and varying game of all? Chess!

I could go on for hours about why it is the most complex, but it should be obvious.

Size of scope and number of units don't nessarily make complexity.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

From this wargamer's perspective chess is not that complicated. Sure, the strategies and nuances of the game are deep and intriguing, but so is any wargame worth its salt. Chess has two terrain types (black and white) and six unit types (king, queen, rook, bishop, knight and pawn). Compare that to ASL, with its myriad of terrain types (woods, marsh, grain, etc.), multitude of unit types (squads, leaders, vehicles, etc.). Then toss in support weapons, which can be transferred around and off-board influences such as OBA and air power. Add in variables such as luck and weather to add spice and you have so many variables to each action that it becomes overwhelming.

In most wargames, especially the more complex ones, there is considerably more things to manage than what one has to handle in chess.

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It is easy to be brave from a safe distance. -Aesop

[Guy w/gun]

That' a rather simple way to see it. War games have to simulate "real life".

Terrain, weather and all the stuff you mentioned are there only because they are there historically in real life. If WWII were fought on flat plains that were clear and dry all the time, i doubt weather and terrain would even be a consideration for developers of WWII war games. It would make more sense to leave them out completely (from a programer's point of view).

Chess is a pure test of strategy, almost as if tanks were fighting in a vacume, and each had a distinc way of dispatching one another.

I didn't say there is more to consider in chess, just that it is infinitly complex and unlike real war, relies VERY little on luck and more on sheer brilliance of strategy.

[Guy w/gun]

Oh and I would like to say that when i say chess is complex, I mean from the fact that it is nearly imposible to repeat a game twice and that it takes a life time to master.

Think about it, even against a human opponent it is very likely that you will repeat your tactics more than once.

For example: play 10 people on the same map and scenario. Lets say that is raining and there is lots of impassable terrain that you opponent cannot move his armor through. But there is a road. More than one of these 10 opponents will try to use the road in some fasion to move his armor.

I know that more expirienced player would consider an ambush waiting for him on the road, but it's important to see that in all 10 of these games you may try to ambush you opponent on the road. Just as he may try to use the road or forget it and risk bogging in. How you ambush the road, with what units, at what point, is not important. The point is that you are repeating the same tactic over again.

This rarely happens in chess. If it does it is simply because of the simplicity of chess' movement (i.e. you may start every game by moving the same piece every time). But generally, your strategy changes each time you play, evolving and expanding as calculate victory.

Like i said, the number of things to think about don't always equal complexity. In ASL they do, but chess is infinite in it's complexity just from a pure strategy viewpoint.

[Guest Andrew Hedges]

ASL, easily. Luckily, it could seem less complex for a couple of reasons: first, at least when it came out, we had all been playing SL through GI, so the transition was much easier than it could have been. Second, you didn't need to know all the rules all the time -- if there were no tanks in your scenario, you didn't have to deal with the tank rules. Third, if you forgot a minor rule, it didn't really matter.

I can't imagine giving someone new the ASL rulebook and asking them to read it.

[Guy w/gun]

I couldn't figure out how to edit messages, so I'd like to say what i was goint to edit in the previous message.

I realized that in war games that you do shape an evolve your tactics to obtain victory. But usually it seems as if your using a "bag of tricks" and tecniques

While a chess player can have tricks, they also must learn to flow with the game. Kinda like the whole Jeet Kune Do thing Bruce Lee taught. Tecniques and tricks are all fine and good, but are no match for someone who can flow with the fight and don't limit themselves to any kind of style or tecnique.

Im not saying that this impossible in a war game-heavens no -im just saying that its seems that its used more in chess.

[crumply]

my brother and I used to play Awful Green Things from Outer Space a lot. 15 years ago.

I remember it as being totally cool when the random capability of the fire extinguisher ended up being something powerful.

[Kestrel]

The GDW air combat games were Air Superiority and Air Strike and the very excellent add-on Desert Falcons (covering the Middle East). J D Webster is still alive and well, and if anyone wants to see this gaming system stretched to historic limits, check out the links next door at the Air Combat Games Forum. Homebrew ratings are available for WWII air forces including Italy, Russia, etc. There is still lots of interest in paper and hex air combat, which is not too far from Flight Commander 2's roots.

The Yaquinto game referencing US vs. Soviet (vs. Alien) space fighters with the true inertia model is called Shooting Stars. It is terrifying to think that people would actually be sent into space using the vehicles modeled in the game. If you take too much thruster damage, your inertia carries you off into space forever (kind of like Darth Vader in THE Star Wars movie). To sleep at night I always assumed that space carriers were available to rescue the wayward fighters. I have to disagree that this was complex, however. Inertial modelling was unique in boardgames (and in computer games, as well), but the basic rules set was about 2 pages long and could be taught in about 15 minutes. In the advanced rules, there was even an alien Web Caster a la the Tholians.

[gezeder]

i don't see that chess is that complex, (stratigically, there may be a lot too it, but it's not complex)

after all, how hard can a game be when a COMPUTER is the best player in the world?

i'd love to see a computer be proven the best in the world, at, say, combat mission

as for Third Reich.... i hope my oppenent doesn't read this topic - i'm trying to rope him into a game of Third Reich this weekend!

[L.Tankersley]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Kestrel:

The GDW air combat games were Air Superiority and Air Strike and the very excellent add-on Desert Falcons (covering the Middle East). J D Webster is still alive and well, and if anyone wants to see this gaming system stretched to historic limits, check out the links next door at the Air Combat Games Forum.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I thought the Air Superiority/Air Strike games were great. Fun, playable, good flavor, and reasonably accurate without being overly complex. Nice twelve-point facing rules. It took about one playing to remember how to fly, and then smooth sailing. Air War, on the other hand, I think suffered from a bad choice of scale. The turns were 5 seconds long, and could take half an hour or more to play. It could take several turns to roll, or to throttle the engine up. When it takes an hour or longer to complete a simple maneuver, there's a problem. I don't need instant gratification, but I'd like to expect it sometime before I die.

Some people have mentioned AH's Flight Leader; if it's the game I'm thinking of, it's not even in the same league. Try again!

Awful Green Things, great fun! Still have it ... somewhere.

Third Reich was complicated, but nowhere near the record. I played it with friends when were were maybe 15. I'm not saying we were particularly good players, but we had the mechanics down. A3R might be another story; I've got it but haven't played it. [i need to get rich, retire, and pay someone to play me.]

Basic ASL isn't all that bad, in my opinion. Ok, it's complicated, I grant you. The big problem with ASL is that it's extremely difficult to learn by reading the rules. They're written really more as a reference than as a means of learning how to play, and they throw tons of abbreviations at you right from the get-go. You really have to just play a game or two with someone that knows what's going on, and once you have a grounding in the basics, things make much more sense.

Here's another fairly complicated one (not the top, but up there): AH's Gettysburg '77 (?) Advanced Game. Every brigade is represented, and occupied multiple hexes depending on manpower (with a column or line counter along with a strength counter in each hex). Every battery had a counter. Every commander at division level and higher had a counter (and actually, the brigade counters served as brigade commanders). Fire was done hex-by-hex, and you had to keep track of strength losses on paper because it took 10 casualty points to inflict a loss of one strength point. Also, you had to track disorganization points inflicted by fire or by expending too many activity points in a turn (moving too far, or whatever) and 10 of those also cost you a strength point, but you could recoup those by resting. You fired hex-by-hex, not unit-by-unit, according to the strength points in the hex and how your line was oriented (bent lines could direct less firepower against any given point, for example). The turns were 20 minutes, and once more than a few units were on the map they could take hours to complete. And that's not using the optional hidden movement rules which required 3 boards, 2 countersets and a GM. Counter density was truly phenomenal, with overlapping units and strength counters everywhere, and the hexes were t-i-n-y. I'd get a few game hours into it and then give up in frustration. A computer adaption might be interesting, though.

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Leland J. Tankersley

[azazyel]

I found the SPI games difficult at first, but after about 3 months of playing various scenarios and "tweaking" the rules a bit, I found the VERY enjoyable and could play them for days on end. Victory Games' Vietnam was, by far, the most difficult game I have ever played.

[the cube]

With regard to the purely material and geometric aspects of a game, combat simulations can be more complex then chess. However this does not neccessarily mean that wargames are more difficult. In fact it's relative simplicity is part of what makes chess such a challenge in that there is little room for error. This combined with the time pressure under which chess players must make their calculations results in a contest with a deeply psychological aspect of a sort that one does not in general experience in combat simulations. It is worth mentioning that when asked if he played chess Einstein replied that he did not because "it is too violent a game"

[This message has been edited by the cube (edited 11-02-2000).]

[This message has been edited by the cube (edited 11-02-2000).]