Monday, March 14, 2011

World in Flames - Days of Decision - Part I

I'm almost done a couple of painting projects, but in the meantime I thought I would post about one of my very favorite games, World In Flames.

World in Flames is a strategic WWII counter game.  The full game has over 7000 pieces.  The game claims to have every individual ship ever built or was ever going to be built for WWII, right down to destroyers. The only trouble with this game, especially in my neck of the world, is finding people willing to play. 

The game can take hundreds of hours to play the full war, so you have to leave it set up and have a major commitment to it.  I believe I have 6 good people to play, so one of my back projects is to get the game blown up and magnetized.  This way I can leave it set up, and it won't disrupt any other games I play.

I think I calculated that if I blow up the main maps the game will be about 5' tall by 24' long.

I've already found a printing company that will blow the maps up for me, and permission from the creator Harry Rowland to do it.  What would come next is to magnetize the 7000ish counters.  I had heard about rare earth magnets long before Flames of War players were putting them into their tanks.  They have also been used to magnetize World In Flames.

One add-on I won't play World in Flames with out is called Days of Decision.  This is a WWII political game that can be played on its own or with WiF.  It allows you to start the game in 1936, and build a country they way you want.  Create the allies you want, go to war when you want.  The creator claims this mechanic creates 14 trillion different outcomes.  It takes an Axis & Allied style game and turned it into a 3 pronged game.  An aggressive Soviet player could actually see themselves facing the brunt of the world. 

With so many different directions you can take your country, we decided to play DoD standalone at least once or twice while we are waiting for me to get WiF magnetized.  We are playing the countries we will play once the full WiF game starts.  That way we can get used to all the political options for our nation.

This past Saturday was our 2nd or 3rd go at it.  And it went a lot smoother.  We managed to get farther then we have in one night.  We made it to the end of 1938.  Just as things were starting to happen.  Japan went to limited war against China, and things were heating up in Europe.

I recommend this game to any WWII enthusiast.  This is my one 10 out of 10 game.

Here is the link to the home site.
http://www.a-d-g.com.au/

2 comments:

  1. Good luck. A friend of mine wanted to do something similar. Based on rough calculations, we figured the game would take 2 years to complete if we played once a week and one Saturday a month. Ouch.

    Now THAT is a "real time strategy game!" :-)

    In the end, we decided to wait for a bit!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Things did go smooth. Much better than the our last crack at it. I'm glad we split DoD out of the main game to get a handle on it.

    ReplyDelete