A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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...