Congratulations and best wishes! A fitting way for you to celebrate would be for you to play a game of A&A Anniversary edition with your local group.

My pleasure. By the way, I wrote “acrylic” above but I’ve double-checked and the correct term is actually acetate sheets, a.k.a. projector transparencies; see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(projection).

Your best option might be to use a simple graphics program like Paint to create either a single large picture or several smaller pictures (depending on whether or not you’ll need to make multiple printouts) consisting of the required interprovincial borderlines and the required names on a clear background. Print out draft versions on plain paper as you experiment with the pictures until you get the sizes and positions exactly right to fit on your map board. Once you’re satisfied, take the files to a local printing/photocopy place and ask them to print the picture (or pictures) on sheets of thin clear acrylic, i.e. the type used for old-fashioned overhead projector transparencies. These can be overlayed on your map and held in place by transparent sticky tape. It should look fairly professional, and it won’t affect the actual map so you can always change it back later if you wish.

@Wittmann said in On this day during W.W. 2:

@CWO-Marc How funny: I thought it was really sad!

I guess the perspective depends on which side of a Stuka attack a person is on: delivery or receipt.

I love the picture of the crashed Stuka because it’s pitched forward at an angle that makes it look exactly like an airborne Stuka that’s diving for an attack.

@IshidO said in Fun Awards suggetions plz:

Thank you for your great ideas! The only problem I see is, that the people need to share this traveling trophy thingy (3 guys if the allies win) and additionaly they won’t fight on the same side in the next year, which makes it even more complicated

I think you have two basic options for addressing this issue, and you could even use them in some sort of combination with each other. Option one is for every member of a winning team to get an individual baton, which they would get to keep until the outcome of their next game (regardless of which side they play) determines whether they get to keep it. This is roughly what happens with military unit citations: every member of the unit receives an individual decoration, in addition to the unit as a whole having the honour noted in its record. Option two (which can be used in conjunction with option one, rather than instead of it) would be for a single trophy to be awarded to the winning team, each of whose members would keep it for part of the time until the next game. This roughly the equivalent of what’s done with the Stanley Cup: there’s only one Stanley Cup, but I think that each team member gets to take it to his home town for a victory parade. The team trophy could perhaps be a flag rather than a field marshall’s baton; in fact, I think that some military unit citations include the element of a flag being added to the unit’s regimental (or whatever) colours. Batons, by contrast, are carried by individuals, so they’re more suitable for the Option one component.

Given that your players are a mixed group with different levels of experience at various other A&A games, I think your best option would be a two-part strategy: start with Anniversary, play a few games to get everyone up to speed, then make the jump to Global. In terms of size and complexity, Anniversary is nicely positioned between the 1942 game and the Global 1940 game, so it’s a good tool for transitioning from the former to the latter. Jumping straight into the deep end of the pool might be less comfortable for the less-experienced players in the group; ideally, you want to set up a situation where the whole gang gets into Global with more or less the same level of skill and enthusiasm, so that nobody feels like an odd man out.

You could probably sell it for a few dollars locally (i.e. sell it in a way that doesn’t involve shipping costs), as Taamvan suggests, but I doubt that there would be much interest in an out-of-town sale, given that the game is missing some of its original pieces. A&A 1941 is still in print, and is the cheapest of the A&A games on the market, so when you factor in the shipping costs a potential out-of-town buyer could probably find a brand-new copy for about the same price. DoManMacgee’s donation idea is a good one; youngsters who’ve never played A&A won’t be bothered by the replacement sculpts, and as DoManMacgee said this would foster the next generation’s interest in the game. My own preference would be in line with Midnight Reaper’s suggestion to cannibalize the game for its sculpts, which are unique to the 1941 version of the game. I own multiple copies of 1941 for exactly that reason. The American P-40 Warhawk gives you exactly the right fighter to use for China’s Flying Tiger unit in the 1940 game; the British naval transport and the Soviet carrier correct the 1940 game’s lack of nation-specific sculpts for those units; and the battlecruisers (British and Japanese) and heavy tanks (Russian and German) provide good opportunites for house-ruled special units in the 1940, 1942 and Anniversary games.

@taamvan said in Fun Awards suggetions plz:

You could make a “traveling trophy” (we used a participation medal I won in a 5K) that stays with the winner of the most recent game and must, like a wrestling belt, be defended or forfeit upon each new contest.

Good idea. In the context of A&A, one ida for a suitable trophy would be a field marshall’s baton. Rommell had two of them: the large, heavy and gaudy official one which was presented to him when he was promoted, and smaller, lighter, more practical “informal” one which he carried around when he was traveling on business. I think Cornelius Ryan’s book The Longest Day mentions Rommell using the informal baton to point to things on the coastline of France on one occasion when he was inspecting beach defenses.

I don’t have any useful thoughts to offer on the specific problem you describe – but your request for a good Commissar to handle the strategic menace to Moscow reminds me of an old thread in which a player had argued that Russia should abandon the East to Japan and concentrate all of its forces on a defense of the capital, to which I jokingly responded that this strategy had been advocated by an obscure Soviet general named Youstayin Moskowvich Izgudenof.