Ralph Boerke's Tribute to Axis & Allies
| Personal History - Ralph Boerke's World at War | The story of my game making career. From playing RISK as a kid to making RISK maps and then to my own games and finding A&A to programming internet games. |
| Xeno's
World at War, Europe at War, Russia at War
Pacific at War is coming soon |
World at War 1939 - a good expansion with a large map and more units
(plastic).
France and China are included for a more realistic world situation. Will have more on Pacific@War when I hear more about it. |
| Gamer's Paradise Expansions I, II, III | Three expansions that use the original (Milton Bradley) map and men and add some new units (cardboard tokens). |
| Magik and Tactics Unlimited | Mideast Combat: Triad vs the Red Pact:
a new map of the Middle East, but you use the same units as the original
game. Turkey, Egypt, and Iran fight Iraq and Russia in this altered 1985
scenario where the USSR has collapsed and mayhem ensues. Isreal and Syria
are neutrals but have power too. New technnologies and Oil wells too.
Alternate scenarios: Gulf war; Iran-Iraq war. |
| Table Tactics | Four expansions! This guy makes his own plastic pieces. Pieces are for World War I, a modern war (hovercrafts, etc.), RISK 2042 (for RISK!), and just more unit types for the original game (ballistic missiles [V2s], etc.). Very good quality. |
| Eric Grenier - New Jan 2002 | Eric has made a hex based map of Europe. The lands are hex and some of the seas are diamonds. He adds geography and has rules for all of the little countires: Finland, Hungary, Romania. He lives near Ottawa Canada and only had made a few of these maps to begin with. (Feb 2002) |
| SCANS of Some Expansions | Chris Pederson has some scans he is working on for some of the Expansion
out there. MidEast Combat and Xeno and Table Tactics are some of the games
he owns.
(July 98) |
| Rules | A collection of new rules I found on the web or made up or have been
passed on to me.
Thrasher (links page) also has some good House Rules he has collected from many sources. http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Stadium/9025 - Thrasher's site |
Tacit Memnos Infinitum Expansions |
Shameless plug to buy my expansions
Expansion #1:GeoPolitics, SupplyTokens, TheWeather (here
now)
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| South East Pacific Expansion - its Free | Uses the boxes in the lower corner of the map and adds a few more IPCs to the game and a few new units at the start. |
| RISK and A&A - sort of Free | Use the RISK pieces - Cavalry, Artillery and Infantry in the game of A&A, now we have Trropers as well as Infantry. |
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| World War II -- the board game that surpasses Axis & Allies
http://www.datamatic.com/skip/skip_pg1.htm |
A very large Map - too costly for me and too big for my table but someone might want it. Let me know how it plays. |
| Max's Alternate/Optional Rules | A $10 book of new rules
There is a link via the Table Tactics site. Go to my page on TT and then to the TT site. |
| AXIS & ALLIES, 2ND: ENEMY ON THE HORIZON | $19.95 due 97/11 ?
BLACK BARON GAME CO. (BBG) (503) 233-6969 10am-9pm PST I have no idea what this is,... just got an email on it. "Adds 3 new unit types to A&A: Hvy artillery, DDs, special forces like Marines. Adds rules for Kamikazes, wolfpacks, paratroopers. Inclues 12pgs of rules & 40 new plastic pieces, new weapon development chart. '97" - THeun, May 98 |
| Hasbro Interactive http://www.hasbro.com
then follow links to CD-ROM games. Nothing on the site as of May 98 but check it out in the future. |
They made the RISK game a computer program and now they're ready to release a CD-ROM version of Axis & Allies - projected for Spetember 1998. |
Personal History [Top]
I found Axis&Allies going through a game store in downtown Toronto. Before this a group of friends of mine and I got together every Thursday to play RISK (by Parker Brothers) and watch the Simpsons, this back in 1991. We soon got tired of Risk as it was limited in its playability. I drew on the map to create a Russia continent, renaming the smaller Asia the orient and having Euorpe smaller. This got my friend, Jeff Duffield, thinking he then started to make a new map of the world which was an excellent rendition copied from old cartographers' work (1500's and 1600's maps). He also got some gromets which he coloured and cut up to make some new units. We now had Infantry, Armour, Ships, Rockets, Land Mines and Sea Mines. My other friend, Dean DeVries, and I worked with Duffy to get the rules down. I was looking for more units and Axis&Allies had some so I bought it. We played A&A and applied its units and some of its rules (combat) to our game which we called World War Zero.
Another friend, Andy Roberts started to play with us and I made a number of maps of ficticious worlds and the games were pretty good. I also started to play a lot of Axis&Allies with Andy who prefered it to the World War Zero game because that game never seemed to end; we would play and if someone got too powerful the others would team up on him until another player became too powerful and so on. So my affair with A&A started.
When I moved (back) to Waterloo in 1993 I brought the game to the attention of some other friends and a new player was hooked on the game. So I play with my friend Glen Morgan on a weekly or monthly basis. Back in 1992 I bought my second set of men from Milton Bradley and in 1993 I bought my first Expansion by Gamer's Paradise (#2). I recently (spring 98) boought 2 more sets of men from MB for $23 CDN P&H included.
After dozens of games I was a bit flustered at Milton Bradley's Axis&Allies. I felt that it was too restrictive and did not emulate the real war enough for my tastes. I started to make my own maps. My first map was basically the A&A map with each territory split into two. The next map I did the territories were again split or cut into threes. In 1994 I bought Xeno's A&A expansion, the World at War. I was very surprised as Xeno's map looked a lot like one that I had made the only major difference is that it had France and China territories coloured. I started to design my maps on the Computer as I was thinking of making a PC version of Axis&Allies and of World War Zero. I have gone through at least ten versions of maps to get all of the effects that I wanted (convoys, fronts, lines of communictaions, large oceans where ships need to patrol for the enemy, lots of room to manuevre armies,...) and have ended up with a map you can see in "Ralph Boerke's World at War PBEM Game".
I also thought that more units (from my World War Zero game) and the neutrals should be included as well. I found the Australian Design Group's the World in Flames and Days of Decision at a game store and have tried to use some of their aspects in the games I am designing.
I have seen Xeno's Europe and Russia at War games in a store but were too pricey for me ($70 CAN). With the Internet I have found some more ideas and opinions on the game. The original Nova map of Axis & Allies was larger and had rules that were similar to some of the Xeno Expansion rules.
My attempts at making a PC version of A&A was not getting too far. At the time I was learning C++ and as I learned I was programming for the game. I was learning graphics and sprites and such when I received a letter from Hasbro (owner of Milton Bradley) asking me to 'cease and desist'. I complied. I have also come in contact with a few other programmers who also received letters from MB or Hasbro asking them to stop. I was surprised and pleased to see Dogs of War - a computer game of A&A. I asked the owner of Dogs of War if he had any problems. He thought at the time he did not but time has shown that MB caught up with him and DOW is no longer available. :(
But my programming has not been in vain. I always wanted to do my original game World War Zero on the PC. But I do not want to get too heavy into trying to program an AI (fuzzy logic, neural nets, etc.) that can compete with humans. I came across the idea of having human opponents and that this can be accomplished on the internet. I am programming a database and an interactive internet site that will allow 50 or so players to wage war on a map that is 20 times larger than A&A's. This internet game also has more of everything - diplomacy, espionage, technology, resources, logistics, and more. I purchased www.worldatwar.com and hope to have this game up and running in mid 1998.
The first scenario will be World War II, but other scenarios are being planned which will include: Napoleon, Rome, WWI, and China. I am a fan of history and especially military history and almost every century has some conflicts that can be (and might be) applied to my game setup.
Axis & Allies also presented an opportunity for me to make expansions that do not conflict with MB and Hasbro copyright laws. I developed some cards that can be played with A&A to expand the game into the realms of geopolitics and resource economies and also add weather effects. My own expansions: GeoPolitics, SupplyTokens, and TheWeather are three attempts at getting more realism into the Axis&Allies game. TheRules is another set of options for inclusion in Axis&Allies. I recenlty posted the South Pacific Expansion and the RISK Expansion on this site. I am also working on two new expansions on my own maps called 1942 Large Map Expansion and the Nato vs Warsaw Pact Expansion.
To the Next Chapter: Xeno's
World at War (Axis & Allies Expansion in 1939)
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