Turns out I got a chance to play a little
Axis and Allies this holiday weekend--emphasis on
little. I talked my father into sitting down for a game of
A&A. Because the box had been turned on its side in the past, all the components were mixed up, and it took us longer than normal to set up. I took the Axis, so my dad played the Allies.
We enjoyed playing a full turn with each country before he had to take my mother shopping. We paused the game until they returned, but once they got back, my father wasn't really interested in continuing. Despite Gonsalvo's comment that
the game's meant to be finished in three hours, my dad had a different take: "World War Two lasted six years," he said. "To play this game it takes eight."
5 comments:
Certainly takes more than three hours.
I had a friend who once managed to take an hour just deliberating about his first move as Japan ...
I've seen it finish in under three hours, but just once and some of the players were high at the time. Played it once, start to finish in about 18 hours basically uninterrupted.
I used to play that game (along with Risk and Shogun) with some friends at a community center, but we where limited by time constraints - two hours. To cut-down on setup time, I would keep all the units, chips and cash needed at the start in their own snack-size zip-lock bag (all the other units would have their own bag), and I would have a deployment cheat sheet for each nation. A deployment cheat sheet is a rough outline of the the territories, with pictures of the pieces you would have to deploy at the start of the game. This helps us to jump right in the game.
We would never really get too far in the game before we have to wrap it up - which consists of playing to the last minute, and then duping everything into the box at the moment (leaving me to sort through them later, at home). Otherwise, it was fun.
Definitely a game to set up in advance, as it is time consuming to put the pieces on the table. I have played it to conclusion in 3-4 hrs, but as with any game depends on the speed of the players and familiarity with the rules. Also, of course, the more players (and it's better with more), the slower it plays. The computer version of the game is actually pretty good and takes care of the set up issues, and allows the game to saved for resumption at a later time. Having said that, the plastic parts are cool but I very rarely play board games these days. Covering all of WW2 in 3-4 hrs is a fairly formidable task! :-)
And to be fair, the newest edition of A&A includes victory conditions to enable shorter playing times.
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