Hey all, I’ve played G40 the past 2 weekends in a row.
First game with 5 guys, standard OOB rules with errata addressed. We put the 2 experienced players as the Axis because we believed it was more of an uphill battle for them, as in Classic. After 8.5 hours we called it around turn 7 (3AM), projecting the Axis victory due to huge momentum (Soviets out and USA/UK failed to make it happen).
Second game was a 1v1 using Larry’s Alpha+.1 ruleset (which felt a lot more balanced actually!), myself as the Allies and another equally inexperienced player as the Axis. The epic 16 hour game was called at turn 10 (7AM) in favour of the Axis for holding Stalingrad as the final victory city.
This particular loss was huge upset for the Allies as the final blow of this drawn out game was extremely anti-climatic. A small Italian force of 3 artillery from the South took Stalingrad 3-0 vs a reasonably safe defense with adjacent infantry to support a counterattack. Moscow was to fall next round. The USA was 1 round away from landing in either London or France with a strong force and sweep an empty Europe. The second and final blow to Tokyo was to occur the very next turn (USA). In short, I feel I stayed up all night to lose to an extremely risky attack and hot dice. My fully staged victory invasion was unable to ever take place.
F.
Things I am thinking for next time, aside from strategy:
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To never try and play this game in a single sitting again, unless you set up the night before and start early in the morning. Otherwise I believe it takes at least two sittings to really enjoy it and not destroy your sleep cycle for a week.
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In Global 1940 I will strongly consider using Low Luck rules solely based of the fact that this game takes an absolute bare minimum of 10 hours to play out completely. It’s not like other (inferior :-P) dice games where it’s like “LOL hot dice!! That was fun, we should play again 3 or 4 more times before bed.” I have not tried Low Luck yet, is it popular? Tell me how you feel about it.