• I find the sea vessels very hard to discriminate. While sub vs. aircraft carrier is obvious, a lot of the 1942 sculpts can be hard to tell apart.  For instance, which sculpt is Germany’s destroyer, and which is their transport?  All 4 vessels appear to have some kind of armament if you look closely, so you can’t use that to distinguish.  I don’t know my historical navies well enough to know, either.  While you can just pick, if you forget your choice it can be very confusing to recall later in in the game.

    I just played and we had a fiasco of a seabattle;  to put it bluntly, we all thought Germany had a battleship + cruiser on the board, when they only had a destroyer and a transport.  Needless to say, it changed the outcome of D-Day.

    You can see that the Germany cruiser is longer than the transport when they are side by side, but if they’re not I don’t think their function is obvious from their form.  Now that I look closely, I can see that one vessel in each navy has square stern, and I assume that is the destroyer.  Still, the Japanese and German transports look unlike the British and American ones, and neither of the Axis vessels look like the transport profile in the rules.

    I’m thinking of adding a dot of paint to help signify which is which for our next time out.  Is there another technique that you guys use, or am I just being dense?  Since my whole group was confused, though, it seems like something the playtesters should have caught during design.


  • In the rulebook for Revised, there are silhouettes for each nation’s sculpts, while the 1942 rulebook only shows the silhouettes for the US sculpts.  According to the Revised rulebook, the German transport is the sculpt that almost looks like a barge with just a couple buildings on it, and all the destroyers have a square stern.

    My group had a hard time with the German sculpts at first, and we had a big argument over whether the square stern like the other nations’ was significant of a destroyer or whether the large building in the center of the flat sculpt was a depth charge…  Another friend with the Revised rulebook straightened us out.  Thankfully all the battleship sculpts are the largest/longest of the navy, the cruisers are shorter than the battleships, and the destroyers all have a square stern.  All of the allies have a 3 column transport, while the Japanese have a transport with 2 columns, and the Germans have the flat, barge-like transport with no columns.


  • I particularly have had trouble with the cruisers and destroyers. I simply just discuss it with the person I’m playing with before hand and we make one unit a destroyer and one a cruiser. For all we know we might have been mixing them up this entire time but those are the units we use for them.


  • Some pretty cool pixs and charts over on boardgamegeek.  Check this one out, should help alot.

    http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/552678/axis-allies-1942-edition?size=large


  • Nice image, thx.  And it points out the fallacy of the “square stern” as a differentiator:  the Russian navy has two vessels with a square stern.

    Not that that is likely to be a problem during play :roll:, but still.

    I might just print that out and include keep it in the box.  Isn’t that kind of ridiculous, though?


  • Ah, yes.  That is true, but you’re right that Russia having cruisers and destroyers with square sterns doesn’t come up as a problem much…  :roll:  And one is still obviously larger than the other while the Russian transport is still the standard Allies sculpt.  Square stern still applies for the rest of the countries that matter for navy.  :-P

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