I used to play the old hex and counter board games. Does anyone have a favorite here. Mine was the AH Panzerblitz and Panzerleader.
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I still have a pretty wide selection of Avalon Hill, SPI, and GDW games from the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, I was pretty much the only one among my circle of friends who liked wargames, so most of the time I was playing solitaire rather than against another player. GDW’s Beda Fomm was a very nice playable “minigame” when I had an hour or two to spare. I had several of GDW’s Europa series (Case White/Narvik/Fall of France/Marita-Merkur), but never had the space and time to do more than read the rules, peruse the maps and look at all those counters…
I used to like SPI’s Battle for Germany, another small game that could be played solitaire, or with two, three, or even four players (I don’t think 4 players was really workable, but the rules explicitly made allowance for it). The Victory in the West series looked good, but I don’t think I ever played any of them (Patton’s Third Army and Sicily: Race for Messina)
In AH’s games, I always liked Squad Leader (I got all the expansions, but baulked at starting all over again with ASL when it came out), The Russian Campaign, Third Reich, and the “is this really a wargame” game, Victory in the Pacific.
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I just found out about Tabletop Simulator on the Steam platform it allows you to play a lot of the older games even if they are out of print. It also allows multiplayer it does not however have an AI.
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My favorite WW2 board game has to be Axis and Allies. I got the four board 1940 one. I have lots of nostalgia playing it with my dad and brother, we liked to divide up the world to be an alternate WW2 with a 3 way war between whatever nations we chose.
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Me and my 2 brothers used to play SPI’s War in Europe. It was a huge game and would take up our entire family room.
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I briefly owned a copy of SPI’s War in the East, but it was part of my big wargame reduction strategy shortly after I got married. I got a quite reasonable return on it at a gaming auction.
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I’m the youngest of three boys, and my oldest brother got us into the Avalon Hill games back in the early 70s. We played all of them including Panzer Blitz, Arab-Israeli War, War & Peace, Battle of the Bulge and Origins of World War II, but my favorite had to be Third Reich. I found that the more tactical games like Panzer Blitz were too technical for my skill set, and enjoyed the campaign games more, since it combined the entire map as well as economic factors, long range strategy, and broad decision-making. We also had some of those naval games like Jutland, but our mom wasn’t too thrilled about us having these massive convoys of cardboard warships littering the floor of the living room. The funny thing about the Avalon Hill games was the ability to cheat. All you needed was someone to walk out of the room for a few minutes to sneak a few tanks or divisions back onto the playing board, something that computer simulations eliminated. Still, those games were a great way to learn about history. We even had Avalon Hill’s Baseball Strategy, but the game was too simplistic and paled in comparison to Strat-o-matic Baseball (which I still play in on-line leagues).
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