Howdy all! Andrew here AKA AndrewAAGamer. Been thinking about posting a lengthy introduction here and finally got around to it. Here is some history of my gaming experience. Currently living in the Seattle area of the good ole US of A! Looking to help other Players become better Players and have some fun gaming too.
I have always loved wargames and when I was little, I would watch my three older brothers play Blitzkrieg; an early Avalon Hill game representing for the most part World War II. I would sit and watch them play for hours and they never let me play because I was too little. There is an 11-year gap between me and my next oldest brother. But I was hooked and like many little boys loved playing wargames. As a teenager I played Midway, Gettysburg and Bismarck and while I loved these games the rule complexities and time it took to play the games made it difficult to play and find opponents. Of course, there was Risk but it was so basic and the main goal was to hide as long as you could.
So, when Milton Bradley came out with Axis and Allies in 1984 it was a done deal for me and I have never looked back. The ease of playing these games in comparison to the Avalon Hill type games is dramatic and having real miniatures instead of cardboard squares – Wowsa! I have played and own all of the Axis and Allies variants and of course many, many more including the Milton Bradley Gamemaster series excluding Broadsides and Boarding Parties which I have never played. Oh, my Fortress America copy is the one with Saddam Hussein on it! I have so many games as my wife says – “You have too many games that take up too much room”. I disagree; you can never have enough games.
As for my gaming experience…
Face to Face: I belonged to the Portland Axis and Allies Meet Up group for over 10 years. The organizer happened to keep track of the games played and in Team games I was 152-3 if I remember correctly. It may have been 152-5 but nevertheless it was well over 95% of the games I played in I won. Now I say Team games because we also played games like Shogun and Conquest of the Empire and those, what I call gang up games, I did not do as well because frankly my opponents would literally say at the beginning of the game “Hey let’s all gang up on Andrew and knock him out because if we do not then we will lose.” Now while they were right, and I understood their reasoning, it did not make if fun for me knowing I had no chance to win and the best I could do was take out whoever attacked me first so I shied away from those games for the most part. But in Team games like Axis and Allies where the sides are set I was virtually undefeated.
From 2013 until now I have played in the Seattle Meet Up group and while we do not keep official statistics, I estimate I have played in around 100 or so games and have won about 90% of them with the following exception.
There is one team of players that joined our Seattle group and they are excellent at Global 1940. In our first game of Global 1940 they cleaned my partner’s and my clock as the Axis. Now we only had about 10-12 Global 1940 games under our belt and unknown to us they had hundreds! They used a German opening we had never seen before and kicked our sorry butts all the way home. Then in our rematch game we were the Axis and we used this newly discovered J1 opening thinking to return the favor and kick their butts only to find out not only did they know how to perform the J1 attack better than we did they also knew how to defend against it and, throw in a Neutral Crush attack we had never encountered before, they again gave us a beating. Well, I am not used to losing two games in a row, so the challenges were on! We beat them in the third game and that is when we found out they played online at TripleA. They told us they had played for over 10 years and hundreds of games and this was the very first time they had lost as a team; ever. That challenge series continues but due to time constraints we play via PBEM now instead though we always love to get a face to face game going.
Face to Face plus PBEM: Well my partner and I caught on fast and as a team my partner and I went 12 and 5 against them before one of them got tired of losing and only wants to play face to face anymore. I do not blame him because I am significantly better online than I am face to face. Online I have time to study every move where you cannot do that face to face. Thus, mistakes happen more often face to face. I like to study the game board, to me that is fun. I do not like Real Time games and play Turn Based games instead. For example, I played and love XCom. After playing it on normal to understand the game I then played it on the highest level. Legend I think it is called. Once I beat it at that Legend level it said less than 1% of the people who had ever played the game won it at that level. Then I kept playing it till I beat it via Ironman. Not many people have accomplished that I am sure. Probably because they are not patient enough or crazy enough to try it. I love games like the Panzer General Series Turn Based games; played them all and beat them all with Major victories giving the computer the highest bonus in money and experience. I love the challenge of beating them when it is most difficult. Anyway, I digress. So, his partner dropped but one of them still plays us and we are 6-1 against him so far. Of course, we do have an advantage now because it is two against one.
Having said all that we are all aware that there are plenty of people who do well in their face to face gaming groups only to find out when they get online they are not as good as they think they are. That is why I mentioned the TripleA team that was undefeated till getting beat by us. However, I do have some online experience too.
Online: For 3-4 years I played at Days of Infamy before unfortunately it closed. For those who are unaware of Days of Infamy it was an Axis and Allies Pacific gaming area. They used a Chess like rating system to determine rankings. The original Pacific, not Pacific 1940. Pacific by the way is a GREAT game if you have never tried it. There is a complicated sub stalling rule you really need to understand but the beauty of the game is that it usually comes down to Turn 7 or 8 and either side can win. None of this the game is only half done but is already over but needs to be played out stuff. It is like D-Day that it usually comes down to the very last turn. How exciting! Now we played to 24 instead of 22 as we found 22 to be just too easy for the Japanese to win. Also, we gave the Allies $15 to put five additional infantries in India to remove the India Crush strategy from the game which we all found distasteful. So, my first 10 games I went 2-8; not an auspicious start but there is a real learning curve to the game. By the time I was done I was the highest-ranking Player. I also achieved a rating score higher than any previous rating ever. In addition, there was a yearly Admiral’s Tournament and in the history of the website I am the only one to be the highest ranked Player AND win the Admiral’s trophy at the same time. Good times.
Later I played at the Superpowers website. Yes, the original website to help test and advance the game before it came out to buy. I think the online site is still up. Again, by the time I was done I was the number #1 ranked Player in spite of the fact that the way some of the online games worked they were gang up games and those were very difficult to win and frankly not very fun. As I mentioned before I prefer team games so that was the main reason I stopped playing there.
From there I went on to Axis and Allies Members Club (AAMC). They played Classic, Revised and AA50 as Global was not out yet. In fact, just before I left Global 1940 was just introduced and there was discussion as to whether to add it to ABattlemap or not. Now I was only there for two years as after a while I found the experience distasteful. As it was a manual gaming system, not TripleA, there were a lot of errors made by the Players and there were exact rules how to remedy any errors. My experience though was that too many people would not follow the rules or ask to not follow the rules and if you, me in this case, asked them to follow the rules I was the bad guy and a “rules lawyer”. Funny how the people breaking the rules were okay with that and the ones of us that wanted to follow the rules were the bad guys. That is probably the number one reason I want fun games where both sides are happy as I do not want arguments over game play. So, for the two years I played there I only played in tournaments. I mention this to understand the competition level that I was not playing chumps to drive up my winning ratio. Every game I played counted in a tournament. For the two years I played there I ended up winning 75.4% of my games. That was the highest winning ratio in the club during that 2-year period. I also made it to the finals in 50% of every Tournament I entered. And I won that Finals game exactly 50% of the time too. Oh, and how I remember that one Revised game I made an unforced error that cost me the game. I could have had a winning Finals record percentage! Nevertheless, the end result was I won 25% of every Tournament I entered. I had more Tournament wins than any other Player in those two years and they gave out points, how many depending on if it was a Major or Minor Tournament, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. My total points earned over the two years was greater than any other Player.
So when asked this is why I tell people I am one of the Best Players in the World. Everywhere I have played I have eventually been the #1 Player for the time I was there. Not only in my in-person gaming groups but online too against Players all over the world. Until there is a worldwide ranking system for Axis and Allies, wouldn’t that be great, I guess it will have to do. Usually though the people I tell yawn, say that’s great, and move on. We Axis and Allies Players get no glory.
I now am at the point I want to play to have fun and help others learn to be better Players. I have always enjoyed coaching other Players and providing tips and I guess deep down I have some teacher blood in me. Trying to figure out how best to give back to the community. That is one reason I wrote the Warfare Principles of Axis & Allies.
