Advanced Squad Leader - ASLOK (split from Where are you ?)

[Adm.Lee]

OCS is the Operational Combat Series, from GMT (no, I don't know what it stands for), or is it The Gamers Counters are divisions, or regiment/brigade/battalions, the maps are 5km hexes, and the turns are 3 days. Various games in the series cover separate campaigns in WW2, like the battles in and around Stalingrad, Sicily, Burma, and so on. There is one for the Korean War, too.
I'm much more of a fan of the older Europa series, from Game Designer's Workshop (GDW, you might have heard of them), now from Game Research/Design and Historical Military Simulations, or HMS/GRD. Those games can be linked to re-create all of the European half of WW2.

[pmulcahy11b]

Yeah we love acronyms. "Alphabet Soup" is a good way to describe a lot of government documents.

I've always had a suspicion that acronyms are around so that normal folk have no idea of what you're talking about. I also have a suspicion that a lot of the officials using the acronyms have no idea what they mean either!

[chico20854]

No problem Kato. I've made my homework, specially when reading the thread "US recovery plan", navigating through all these CONUs, CINCEUR, CINCLANT, CINCCENT, CINCPAC, CINCUSFK, AOR, EURCOMs, MEF, CINCNAVCENT,TAACOM, ELF, JCS, TDM, FEMA, XO... But the material posted deserves the effort.

I try to put it written out the first time I use it, except for ones that are more common around here (like TDM, FEMA and XO). I'll have a glossary and abbreviation list in the Survivor's Guide to the US.

[Jason Weiser]

Yeah..
The Gamers stuff is good and solid..rules are a bit crunchy..but if you can find Force Eagle's War, then you could have something that would all you to do some battalion-brigade fights with modern equipment. (I like it better than the Assault series GDW put out).

Another honorable mention is Lock n' Load's "Next War" Series. It's fictionalized, but it plays right and is dirt simple, and the same scale as Assault. All you have to do is redo the maps to fit actual terrain and you're set. They've already done Germans, and Brits are about to be released for the system.

As for ASL... Power to those that play it...but those rules are written such that one might need their PhD in Wargaming. It's why I play miniatures instead.

[Marc]

I think that the first wargame (in the full sense of the term) was Omaha Beachhead, of Avalon's Hill. An hex-map game designed at the battalion level. My second experience was with Command Decision and, tough I think it's a great game, by the time we played it I thought that it needed too much previous work. Funny think, in the present day I can spend months doing research and writing a new campaign. About Command Decision, a quarterly magazine was published titled "Command Post". All the fanatics of the ORBAT's (my first mysterious acronym discovered in this forum) will find detailed lists of armies from WWI to the present day.

A little OT: Now it can sound strange, but in 1992 (when I purchased Command Decision) only a couple of stores exists in Barcelona specifically covering the world of roleplaying games and wargames. And the material was mostly published in English. Of course,thanks to internet I had access to great materials that were never published in Spain. Then I realized about the large extension that this world had reached long before the 90's in the US. Now I have gigabytes of material obtained by...shhhhhhtttt... those magical methods... thanks to people that wished to share information that I should never be able to get.

[pmulcahy11b]

As for ASL... Power to those that play it...but those rules are written such that one might need their PhD in Wargaming. It's why I play miniatures instead.

I found ASL to be somewhat like chess -- the rules are not conceptually difficult, it's winning where you need your Wargame PhD!

[Adm.Lee]

I found ASL to be somewhat like chess -- the rules are not conceptually difficult, it's winning where you need your Wargame PhD!

I'd go the other way. The last few times I've played, I sat down with guys who do know the rules. I just play basic infantry tactics, and let him sort it out.

[Jason Weiser]

I found ASL to be somewhat like chess -- the rules are not conceptually difficult, it's winning where you need your Wargame PhD!

Conceptually...no. It the special cases and everything in mathmatical notation that kinda threw me! For example, does < mean less than or greater than And the LOS rules made my eyes bleed. I'll stick to miniatures thanks...and just use laser pointers and periscopes to check LOS.

[bigehauser]

I've always had a suspicion that acronyms are around so that normal folk have no idea of what you're talking about. I also have a suspicion that a lot of the officials using the acronyms have no idea what they mean either!

An older, saltier Army buddy/reenactor buddy of mine(actually retired and border patrol agent now, matter of fact) and I believe that the Department of Defense (DOD ) create the acronym first, based solely on coolness factor...then figure out how the hell they are going to tie it into the equipment's type and use by combing the dictionary and thesaurus later.

HAWK, MILES, MOPP, FLASH just to name a few that I can recall.

-Hauser

[copeab]

As for ASL... Power to those that play it...but those rules are written such that one might need their PhD in Wargaming. It's why I play miniatures instead.

I prefer computer wargames (like the Steel Panther series) since (1) I don't need to find a human opponent and (2) you don't have to worry setting up or putting away the map and tokens.

[Earthpig]

I prefer computer wargames (like the Steel Panther series) since (1) I don't need to find a human opponent and (2) you don't have to worry setting up or putting away the map and tokens.

They have a digitalized version called VASL(Virtual Advanced Squad Leader) using the VASSAL(don't know all the letters for that one) engine. I can play via skype with people around the world. You still need the rules and scenarios but every thing else is pretty much in the program

[Graebarde]

I prefer computer wargames (like the Steel Panther series) since (1) I don't need to find a human opponent and (2) you don't have to worry setting up or putting away the map and tokens.

Loved the Steel series, having all three. Sadly they were DOS, and I haven't got the computer expertise to figure out how to play them on the others, even when I got a DOS to load. Need to get an old machine to just play them on. Grae

[Haven]

Steel panthers 2 updated for Free and works with Windows....

Edit: better linkage....

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Camo_Workshop/MBT/MBT_page.html

Direct link to download...

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Demos/FV_MBT.html