A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Screenshot of Strategic Command WWII: World at War main menu screen. © Fury Software/Matrix Games/Slitherine Ltd.  On December 6, 2018, British PC game publisher Matrix Games released Strategic Command WWII: World at War, a turn-based grand strategy wargame that depicts the Second World War on every major front from Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1939 to the end of the conflict in the summer of 1945. Developed by Toronto-based Fury Software for Matrix, Strategic Command WWII: World at War (or WAW) is part of the rebooted Strategic Command series that includes Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe, Strategic Command Classic: Global Conflict, and this year's Strategic Command: World War I.  Fury created this long-running series in the late 1990s, publishing its original game, Strategic Command: European Theater in 2002 through Battlefront. WAW is the fifth game in the series and it was designed by Hubert Cater and Bill Runacre, Fury Software's president/lea...

One of the best map board-based war games of all time, Milton Bradley's Axis & Allies is an interesting and very exciting World War II strategy game. In college days of yore, a friend of mine and I bought our first game, with its hundreds of game pieces, dice, rulebook and colorful world map depicting a (very stylized) view of the war situation in the spring of 1942. The original edition of Axis & Allies is -- if you can still find a copy, that is -- a beautiful board game to see and play, but its main drawback is that it's time consuming to set up. You can't place your forces at random; each of the five major powers (USSR, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.) has a card telling players where they must place their initial forces on color coded regions all over the world. This process alone can take up at least 15 minutes, perhaps more. Another problem was the duration of game play. Depending on one's grasp of the basic rules and analytic...

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 ...