Has CM killed ASL and other board games?

[junk2drive]

real life killed board games for me long ago. age killed my desire for rts. cm killed my desire for turn based hex games.

i cant believe more sp players dont make the move to cm. but i do see some names from those forums here.

[flamingknives]

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

My eyes!

[Richie]

Hehehe

Art is having a 9-2 Leader that can do no wrong...

Personally I find ASL more intimate, there is a rule for everything and everything has a rule...

Successful units battle harden...

and you see every dice roll, regardless of who won the arguement...

But CM sure is a hell of alot more fun, ain't it?

I mean, FOG 'IS' FOG! Your can't see squat!

[dalem]

Here is my game shelf.

I still like SL/ASL a whole bunch, but 3 things about CM did kill it for me.

1) the convenience, like everyone else is saying.

2) ease of actual game play. No charts or overlays or rules gaps or searching for that special case.

3) accuracy. for all its research and love and care and detail, ASL just can't cut the mustard next to the accuracy of CM.

But SL will always be the best SL-type game out there.

-dale

[Kitty]

Originally posted by dalem:

Here is my game shelf.

I still like SL/ASL a whole bunch, but 3 things about CM did kill it for me.

FOW killed it for me. You forgot about FOW, dalem. Dalem, what about FOW?

[Sergei]

You play with FOW on??? But then you can't see your enemies! :eek: What's the point of that?!

[Kitty]

Oh stop it. =)

[dalem]

Originally posted by Kitty:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by dalem:

Here is my game shelf.

I still like SL/ASL a whole bunch, but 3 things about CM did kill it for me.

FOW killed it for me. You forgot about FOW, dalem. Dalem, what about FOW? </font>

[Kitty]

Originally posted by dalem:

Well, SL has Concealment and Hidden Placement so there is an element of FOW present in the game. Plus I tend to be a "realistic" player and don't always send my "scissors" over to meet the opponents newly-revealed "paper" in SL. I try to stick to a plan of some sort.

All that being said, FOW is one of the most important elements of CM. It;s just not what ruined ASL for me.

Did you like my sauce recipe, by the way?

-dale

Yes, it has "elements" of FOW but they tend to suck as far as cats are concerened. =)

No, but it's sitting on my kitchen counter waiting to be made. I've looked at it about 3 times in the last 2 days but haven't had time to do anything about it. Alas, my mom has requested Moules Marinere today so I won't be able to try your sauce within the next 24 hrs at least. =(

[Panzertruppe]

Nope!

I started board gaming in the 60's with "Africa Korps",then SL and then ASL. I still get together up at my cabin with buddies for some "counter pushing" with ASL every few months!

Still great fun!

[GJK]

Originally posted by dalem:

Here is my game shelf.

I still like SL/ASL a whole bunch, but 3 things about CM did kill it for me.

1) the convenience, like everyone else is saying.

2) ease of actual game play. No charts or overlays or rules gaps or searching for that special case.

3) accuracy. for all its research and love and care and detail, ASL just can't cut the mustard next to the accuracy of CM.

But SL will always be the best SL-type game out there.

-dale

You have both Patton's Best and Carrier. You might be interested in my PC conversion of those games. Monitor the front page of The Proving Grounds for updates (or email me). I'd like to do Ambush 3rd but will need to pick up a copy from ebay or somewhere.

[Michael Dorosh]

GJK - what is the status of the Patton's Best conversion? I remember discussing artwork with you last year.

Ambush! would be a great idea. If I was ready to part with my copy, I would send it to you...but I'm not!

Although, would your conversion give the ability to create new scenarios for that classic?

I do wish more "classic" board games had a direct translation to the PC. I've looked at Virtual ASL but don't think it would ever replace CM for me. However, a virtual Ambush! might be different...

[dalem]

Originally posted by GJK:

You have both Patton's Best and Carrier. You might be interested in my PC conversion of those games. Monitor the front page of The Proving Grounds for updates (or email me). I'd like to do Ambush 3rd but will need to pick up a copy from ebay or somewhere.

Awesome! I will do that. Let me know if you can't find a copy of Ambush! and I'll send you mine.

I have the tank-only version of Ambush! (Open Fire!) but didn't like it as much.

-dale

[The Vyrdolak]

Originally posted by Richie:

Or should that read 'bored' games...

Man... I used to play ASL religiously. I haven't played in years.

I haven't played ASL since about 1993 or so.

After Avalon Hill closed up shop, Rex Martin did

his doctoral dissertation on "The Rise and Fall of Carboard Wargamingin the 1970s" [approximate title] at the University of Pennsyvlania. I found an abbreviated version on the web at one point, but I can't find the bookmark.

His master's thesis, which I got to look at a hardcopy of when I used to playtest there on Wednesday nights, was on the Russo-Uberfinn war.

[Ketil]

I thought Hasbro killed ASL

I had pretty much drifted away from board wargames long before CM came out. I had hundreds of them and my best friend and gaming buddy had even more. He unfortunately killed himself the year before CM came out, he would have loved it and driven everyone here nuts with his posts lol.

Lack of opponents, time, space all helped me drift away from boardgames, I still have around a hundred or so in storage, but Ebay has been helping me thin that out to some extent. Would prolly do the same with my miniatures but I love the little guys too much.

CM does FOW better than any boardgame could, even double blind refereed games. The only thing ASL has over CM is the ability to use any units from any theatre/time frame together and the Pacific

Oh and horses

I lived in College Park MD during my gaming heyday so I went to E Read St some too, we had a TRS-80 carrying case FULL of ASL counters at one point lol.

Couldnt find Rex's article but I found a similar one by Greg Costikyan......

http://www.costik.com/spisins.html

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Ketil:

Couldnt find Rex's article but I found a similar one by Greg Costikyan......

http://www.costik.com/spisins.html

FASCINATING stuff. I always wondered where "Victory Games" came from - and why their games were so much better and more innovatie than AH's - and why after such a promising start we heard so little from them afterwards.

I would have bought ten more Ambush! modules had they stuck around.

Even more interesting:

Perhaps S&T's most important innovation, however, was its feedback system. Using primitive Burroughs, later IBM, minicomputers, Dunnigan put together a highly sophisticated system to obtain marketing information from his customers. In every issue of the magazine, there was a response card, with 96 numbered blanks. At the back of the magazine were a series of questions, to which a reader could respond by entering a number between 0 and 9 on the blanks of the card. Some questions provided marketing data, e.g., average age of the readership; some were used to provide competitive rankings of SPI's and other publishers' products, charts that S&T's readers pored over when deciding what game to buy next. And some were used to ask the readers what kinds of games they'd like to see. Indeed, every issue provided brief write-ups of game ideas, and SPI would design the games which received the highest ratings.

This kind of market research was astonishing for the field, remains astonishing for the field, would be astonishing in any field. SPI had immediate, timely data telling it precisely what its most valued customers thought. For years, the sales of SPI's games correlated very closely with the feedback results; SPI could predict, with virtual certainty, a game's sales before embarking on its design. How could the company lose?

[The real question, of course, is: why hasn't this been imitated? In the early 70s, SPI had to hire keypunchers to sit there by the hour, entering this data, then crunch the numbers hour by hour using expensive computers and expensive custom software. Today, reproducing SPI's feedback capabilities would be trivial, using OCR technology, flatfile database software, and cheap PC clones. And yet every company in the field continues to publish by guess and by God. Think what TSR alone could do with THE DRAGON....]

Or what BFC could do with a couple of polls...

[ July 24, 2004, 11:11 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[Sanok]

Originally posted by Elmar Bijlsma:

And anyone who has seen the Dorosh ASL mods for CM will testify that ASL finished off CM!

I use the ASL mods for CMBB. It helps my older computer very much. I did replace the open ground with a grid mod, though.

[Sanok]

Originally posted by Carl Puppchen:

One thing I liked about the ASL and SL series are the national characteristics. For whatever reason in CM a squad is pretty much a squad. Give me a squad of free french with rifles and an LMG or a squad of russian infantry that are all regular and they all act the same (excepting the human wave, of course). I really liked the way they attempted to "build in" the national characteristics that REALLY DID matter, such as the British refusal to cower, the Russian occasion of going berserk, and the plethora of German leaders, and the Americans having plentiful ammo.

This thread has brought back fond memories of the wargaming group we had when I was in high school in the late 70s. The local library allowed us to use a conference room they had. Thursdays after school, we would play wargames until closing. All day Saturday, we played Dungeons and Dragons.

We played SL when it first came out. We joked about one of the German squad leaders that actually had a negative morale rating. We nicknamed him Colonel Klink.

[With Clusters]

I still remember my first game as the Germans assaulting the Tractor Factory (where you get to play with the super-HQ, the 10-3 obergruppen!).

I prepped the assault nicely with MGs and flamethrowers (I must have had one that didn't run out of ammo after the first shot), and sent in the engineers. The 8-3-8s made it accross the free fire zone in the street (thanks to the leader's +3 command bonus), ready to kick some Red ass, when lo-and-behold, the obergruppen rolls a 12! :eek:

After seeing their formerly god-like commander run screaming for the hills like the most worthless green conscript, the engineers all blew their new moral checks. Just like that, the attack was stopped butt cold, game over.

It certainly made for a good annecdote, and my opponent enjoyed it imensly, but that disturbing incident put a real damper on my enthusiasm for SL.

[Nidan1]

I often open the boxes of Panzerblitz, ASL and SL,and all my SPI games that used to come with the monthly magazine, just to look at the counters, read the instructions...linger over the combat results tables. But since CM came out I haven't played them.

My son and I played a few games when he was younger, AH's Guadalcanal was his favorite, but now, even he is hooked on CM.

It used to be fun trying to calculate all the factors like LOS, hidden units, combat odds and all that. Now, the computer has taken away all of those chores, and BFC has created the ultimate tactical simulation IMO.

[Brent Pollock]

Pretty much the only boardgaming I do now is at the annual FallCon tourny...and even at that it's mostly miniatures now that I've started taking my 11-year old son.

Before CM came along, he and I managed Axis and Allies or TSR's Battle of Britain every now and again, but he was really too young for them. Now it's CM all the time. Haven't even bothered pre-ordering the upcoming Axis Minors ASL module, even though I've got pretty much everything else up to the OWT HASL.

It took all of about 5 minutes of the CMBO demo for ASL to get relegated to the back burner. Once the kinks are ironed out in CMX2 (Operations oddities, better night mimic, borg spotting, etc.), it should all be over and done with.

Having said that, I can't stand the thought of selling off my ASL stuff, or any of the other boardgames, for that matter.

[Sanok]

Originally posted by Brent Pollock:

Having said that, I can't stand the thought of selling off my ASL stuff, or any of the other boardgames, for that matter.

Same here. My seventeen-year-old son has asked about the games, but we've never played any of them. I have Panzerblitz, Panzer Leader, Third Reich, Richtofen's War, D-Day, and even Kriegspiel and Tactics II. lol

BTW, was SC designed after Third Reich? It seems very similar.

[Ketil]

I think the board is same scale, 4 hex Switzerland and all that. Gameplay is very diff though. Like a weird cross between Axis and Allies and 3rd Reich.

Mike D, did ya read the other articles on Costikyans site? Some interesting stuff there....this is badinfo btw, glad to see ya still have my Blanco #3 skin up hehe.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Ketil:

I think the board is same scale, 4 hex Switzerland and all that. Gameplay is very diff though. Like a weird cross between Axis and Allies and 3rd Reich.

Mike D, did ya read the other articles on Costikyans site? Some interesting stuff there....this is badinfo btw, glad to see ya still have my Blanco #3 skin up hehe.

http://www.costik.com/onlinsux.html

Guess he hasn't played Fiefdom!

badinfo...long time!

[CMplayer]

Board wargaming is adapting to the computer market, rather like the movies had to adapt to the coming of TV. Boardgames are more social to play, but the newer games coming in the wake of computer wargames need to have less number-crunching, better graphics and really play up the fun of a good evening's gaming with a buddy. So they are going a bit in the beer & pretzels direction.