Multi-Board A&A Classic/2nd edition.

So, I’ve played many variations of this over the years, in one place or another, with one gaming group or another, and had more folks wanting to play this than the official game.

Yes, the board is bigger, yes the game takes longer to play a single players turn, and yes, you have way too much money to spend. All that being so, the big drawback to regular A&A is that each and every game starts off exactly the same, and because of the nature of the board and sequence of play, some things are always going to happen.

In Multi-Board, even the placement of the game boards is subject to change, as well as the starting positions, and the neighbors you have to face, before you even encounter your real enemies.

Multi-Board is exactly what it sounds like, you play the game using two or more classic A&A boards, which can either be placed end-for-end, or south/south, or even both of the above when going for 4+ boards.

Their are a great many ways to play, and it can be a blast, but until I can build a table to setup the boards, I cannot even provide a picture. Later this month, I’ll have my Crazy Ivan youtube channel up and running, and then I can do some demonstration videos.

For now, just picture two classic boards joined end for end, and each of the two players starting off on on boards Russia. There are only 5 colors, so either you are limited to just 4 players, or there cannot be any neutrals in the game. If you have 2 players, each just picks a color, and sets up in Russia, with everything Russia has. The rest of the forces of each nation are setup as neutrals, and each player fights their way through the surrounding neutrals, and makes contact with the other players expanding empire, and then the real battles begin.

If your just playing with 24 IPC’s, and have to buy your first units, and not the whole armies for Russia’s starting forces, you can limit or eliminate the neutrals, and just blitz across the otherwise empty board, placing control markers as you rapidly expand. Total value for each board is still 147, but each player is in a race to grab all that they can grab.

You can also place the two boards south pole to south pole, and this is also an interesting variant, with Africa/Australia becoming major staging areas and battlegrounds.

Unless folks have two physical boards to play on, and several extra sets of pieces, no-one could really play this, but now, with TripleA, I just need to talk someone into doing the work to implement the coding, and then everyone can enjoy these much better balanced game, without actually owning any boards/pieces.

Back in the day, I owned 7 boards, and 10 sets of pieces total, and we would all have a blast, but the biggest gaming tables I ever built were 4’ x 8’, and even just a four board setup would take up 40" x 66".

You know, I may just try to set this up and take a pic from my phone, and post that here. My webcam cannot even show one board close up enough to be able to clearly see the pieces, but the phone just might be able to…

Hang on a second.

Here is a crappy shot, but it gets the idea across well enough…

It’s big, and unplayable without the room to get around it, but on a computer, none of that matters!

Now, picture those four boards on an 8’ x 4’ table. There would be about 15" open space on each end, but only 4" along the top and bottom edges. To go beyond 4 boards, you would need a bigger table, because if you went for the six boards, they would actually over hang the ends of the table.

Most of the limited pics I posted were over on the tripleA site, so go over there if you want to see a couple more.

I wonder what it will take to get this coded into tripleA?