Axis & Allies: The Board Game revisited

I first played Axis & Allies almost 30 years ago when Milton Bradley (now Avalon Hill/Hasbro) first published it as a board game. It was heavily promoted in Playboy magazine with an impressive print ad campaign.  When Hector Perez, a college buddy of mine, and I were looking for an intellectually challenging pastime, I suggested we look for a copy of Axis & Allies. Even though it was pretty pricey for my budget ($30.00 at Toys R Us), Hector and I went "halfsies" and bought a set. We ended up playing Axis & Allies all afternoon and well into the night, with the Axis (under Hector's command) triumphing over the overmatched Allies (yours truly).

Change the Course of History in a Few Short Hours
AXIS & ALLIES is a classic game of war, economics, and strategy. Victory goes not only to the team that conquers its opponents on the field of battle, but also to the individual player who seizes the most enemy territory.

Axis & Allies has many virtues as a board game. It is set in the spring of 1942, which was the "high water mark" for the Axis powers (Germany and Japan; Italy is, for simplicity's sake, not a player and absorbed into the Axis-controlled Southern Europe region). Germany and Japan are at the height of their military potential but financially vulnerable. The Allies (USSR, United Kingdom, and U.S.A.) are militarily weak but industrially strong. 

Each player had color-coded troops,ships, subs, planes and tanks, plus industrial complexes and anti-aircraft guns, all of which had to be placed on the mapboard as indicated by each nation's quick reference card. Each player also had a certain starting income measured in Industrial Production Certificates (IPCs) based on the total value of the territories under his or her control. Each player placed his forces as indicated, then went through several steps -- Weapons Development, Unit Purchase, Combat Moves, Non Combat Moves, and New Unit Placement -- during a turn to carry out his or her country or coalition's strategic goals (to defend own turf while grabbing enemy territories and more IPCs in the bargain). After either a military victory (each coalition capturing two of the Capitals) or an Axis Economic Victory (based on a particular increase of IPCs), the game would end.

The board game, of course, required quite a bit of time to set up. Units had to be set up "just so," not placed at a player's whims. The mapboard, which was (and still is) color coded for each of the warring nations (brown for the USSR, gray for Germany, light brown for the U.K., yellow for Japan, and olive drab for the U.S.A.) could accomodate stacks of units and even had extra spaces to ease the confusion between land and sea spaces or to solve "overcrowding."

Still, even with the game's reference cards to serve as a guide, this stage of the game still took about 15 minutes, sometimes more. There was also the matter of moving the forces from the main mapboard to the battle board. Also, keeping track of national markers to reflect changes in territorial ownership and IPC levels required patience, attention to detail, and dexterity. 

Photo: Wikipedia

As in most board related war games, units had attack/defense factors built in (Infantry, for instance, attacked at rolls of 1 but defended at 2) and the factors defined both strategy and battle results, since "combat" was resolved with throwing dice. For each unit on the Battle Board (where you placed your pieces in a Combat Move) you had a die, and each unit was placed on the Battle Board according to its attack/defense number. You rolled dice by category (Infantry first, because it had low roll numbers, for instance), so if you had five infantry units, three tanks, and one bomber (with attack values of 1, 3, and 4, respectively) you rolled five dice for the infantry, then the tanks, then the bomber. If three of the five Infantry dice resulted in 1, three defending units were hit. If the tanks rolled 3 or less, they'd hit...and so on. The defender would then place his/her "killed" units behind the casualty line, roll for ALL the units (since combat was considered to have taken place simultaneously), and if he/she scored hits on the attacker, both players would then remove their "dead" and the attacker would decide if he/she would continue the attack or retreat, based on the casualties and remaining enemy strength. (Amphibious attacks and submarines had special rules, as did AA guns.)

Once the player had enough IPCs to warrant the gamble, he/she could set aside 5 IPCs for one attempt to develop new technology. For each attempt one had to buy a die (at the expense of buying a combat unit), and in order to "develop" something the roll had to be a 6. Then the die had to be rolled again to determine what new tech the player had discovered. Most players skipped this step in early stages of the game in order to buy combat units, only risking IPCs when they had a comfortable advantage over their opponents.

As in Risk, the more combat situations each player could carry out in one turn the better, assuming that there was enough of a mix of air, land, and sea forces to ensure victory in as many as possible. Of course, the attacks not only depended on the ratio of attackers to defenders, but also on the randomness of the dice. Often, what looked like a flawless plan involving Navy battleships and transports, Army tanks and infantry, and Air Force bombers and fighters would fall apart because the die rolls were not...um....favorable.

It wasn't a game that required a degree in modern history, obviously, nor did knowledge of the actual war matter, but a certain amount of patience and analytical skills was essential. Players had to be aware that a certain mix of units was necessary to defeat an opponent; sending Infantry units alone, no matter how numerous, against an enemy territory defended by Infantry, Armor, and Fighters was and always would be suicidal, and sending a Fighter or Bomber to attack a space defended by a single Infantry unit was a waste of effort, since even if the defender was destroyed, the air unit could not occupy the territory desired. So a player with a head for numbers and some tactical savvy could nearly always defeat a player who knew his/her history but was clueless about random numbers and attack/defense ratios.

Nevertheless, I thought Axis & Allies was a good game and loved to play it, even though I rarely did once my friend Hector moved out of town. I've recently introduced it to a few friends of mine, with mixed results. Some liked it and played when they had a free day, while others found it nice to look at but tedious and time consuming to set up.

Axis & Allies contains
299 Plastic Playing Pieces
1 Game Board
Industrial Production Certificates (money)
Instruction Book
7 Charts
Control Markers
12 Dice
6 Storage Trays
Plastic Chips
2-5 Players



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 30.00
Type of Toy: Board Game
Age Range of Child: Other