I was gaming with someone recently who was polite and respectful enough for me to invite him to our monthly A&A G40 group games. He gratefully accepted as he was looking for a G40 group to play with for some time, so when I asked him if he was experienced, he replied “oh yes, very much so”. As we began talking more I explained that we play with some house rules, at which point I referred to the Halifax expansion. He was very surprised “Why would you let the Allies spend like that? That seems pretty over powering for them”. At this point I made a few realizations about his experience, and I simply asked "do you visit the online forums much? he said, “not at all”. I then asked “In your games, when do the Axis attack and bring the Americans into the war?” he replied… “we don’t bring them in, the American’s always declare war at the end of their turn 3, why give them the extra NO money?”, you can guess what we talked about after that. Now I’m not saying that you have to participate on the forums to be experienced, I call my self experienced and I don’t play half as much as the TripleA crowd, but even though he had played many many games, he was still low on the “Strategy Ladder”.
The strategy ladder is something I think about when I see a player playing Germany and leaving #111 untouched while bringing 4 planes into France. On the other side of the coin, I remember playing with more experienced players who showed me the Toranto raid for the first time, and explained the importance of taking the Islands with Japan before taking Calcutta (I was such a newbie back then). Now with the latest dominating Axis strategies, unless you were online playing different experienced opponents all the time, you may not have a clue of the latest game changers. So instead of seeing players as experienced or not, I see where they might be on the strategy latter, meaning that knowledge and game play practice of the most recent gambits yet to be countered would place you high, and playing out strategies that are old and have been debunked and counted over and over, would put you lower on the ladder. Even though our new member to the group has played many games with the same players for years (he recently moved to Toronto away from his friends) he has no idea of the J1 attack on the Pacific Allies basically paralyzingly them.
Just thought I would share that story.