June Update....(Pulp Nazis, Sailors, Characters and Counting)....

Well it's been a while dear readers since I updated this blog.

June wasn't a particularly fruitful month. A dear friend of mine was put into hospice and then passed away two weeks later. I've also had to make two out of state work trips, so my weekend time has been pretty much worked over...I'm afraid that July is really not looking that much better, although to be honest, I am hoping the July 4th weekend will be more geared towards painting and reducing my lead pile

Speaking of lead pile.....

1:  The Lead Pile...

Last month I do believe, I sat down one day and was going to paint and instead ended up with the "swell idea" of counting and inventory my 28mm figures.

Foolish idea....

You know what they say "the road to hell is paved with", right?

It wasn't an easy task....as the picture below shows....

Trying to count 28mm figs....and having a good cry....WHERE did all of this lead come from???.....

But in true fashion and form I got it done...

Here is my current count:

Total unpainted lead figures: 872

This is broken down in the following:

1: Misc: 15
2: Gangsters: 21
3: Pirates: 223
4: VSF/Colonials: 37
5: Cowboys/Old West/19th Century ACW: 220
6: Sci-Fi: 27
7: Pulp: 123
8: Horror: 73
9: Fantasy: 44
10: WWII: 11
11: 18th Century: 69
12: Cannons: 10

There are indeed more around here....I just know it....

2: Figures I have gotten done, (WIPS):

Here are some of the Pulp figs I got done during May (which was a pretty good month for painting figs), and for June, (which in good karmic balance, wasn't so good)....

Nazi Agents, Herr Statler und Herr Waldorf...always ready to serve The Third Reich in manners most foul...

After the Nazis come my first few hillbillies....(These are the BlueMoon "Hardfelts" that I picked up from The Little Wars Convention last year)...

Go ahead...you can sing the theme song...you got it running through your head..."Come and listen to the story 'bout a man named Jed..."

And somehow or another "MORE" Nazi's got painted....

"Sturmbannfuerher Ilsa's Valkure Liebenmaidens..."

Ilsa's "Special Squad"...These frauleins have deep deadly desires....

Sturmbannfuerher Ilsa herself.  She doesn't like weak willed people and believe firmly in "Discipline with A Passion"...

Hilda; who prefers "old school brownshirts" (they iron better and starch up nicer), She is deadly with her Mauser and many an unfortunate fellow has fallen in her sights. Before the war she was the Apfel Strudel Baking Champion for her region of Bavaria for three years in a row. Oddly enough she is very romantic and believes that "The way to a mans heart is through his stomach...with either her strudel or her bayonet..."

Meanwhile, back at the household, we have Gibbets, The Butler.....

He's always there and ready to serve a much needed drink, as well as dispensing unwanted advice, and opinions on all matters; as well as letting visitors know that "Their presence is no longer needed, desired, or wanted within the household", while he cheerfully guides them to the door..

And of course to keep the cars running we have Phillip the Chauffeur....

 He keeps the Dusenberg and the Rolls-Royce spotless, gassed up, and in tip-top shape....
He also keeps a little notebook in which he jots down "Things he just happens to overhear or see while doing his duty."...
He considers it his future "insurance policy" in case something unpleasant ever comes up of his preference for dressing in women's clothes when he is on his own personal time....

Remember when you saw those recruiting posters that said "Join The Navy and See The World!" ???

Well these guys did....

Here's my first batch of sailors from the "Special Gunboat" USS Galveston...

"Join The Navy and See The World!" was what the posters and the recruiters said...
What they "didn't" say was that these sailors would be "somewhere overseas" and up to their eyeballs in "things going on...."

LTJG Pulver comes from a "Navy Family". He lost an uncle during The Great War, and one of his grandfathers was almost drowned nine times during his naval career of six short years, (the tenth time, he wasn't so lucky)…

Following in the family footsteps of his male ancestors before him, he leads this band of "All American Boys" wherever they are ordered to go…

He dreams of one day leaving The Navy, (before it kills him), and going back home to Delaware, and getting a nice soft safe job somewhere, a nice gal, and learning oil painting…

But those days are yet to come….Right now, he's got his .45 locked and loaded, and ready for whatever comes around the bend….

And every good officer (or not so good officer), needs a good, secondary....

Gunners Mate 1st Class Holloman has been in The Navy since 1928. He prefers overseas service to duty stateside, as it gives him more leeway for the crap games that he runs after hours as well as for his extensive black-market deals that he is involved in. He can smell a fast buck to be made as easily as some folks smell coffee early in the morning…

With his tattooed arms, (a heart for his mom on his left arm, and an anchor for The Navy on his right arm), and his preference for Tommy Guns, he's ready to follow LTJG. Pulver where they need to go, and to help deal with whatever could be out there that's cutting into his profits.

And finally...where would any crime ridden, corrupt, greedy city be without a corrupt "boss" behind the scenes pulling the strings???.....

Enter Mr. Hugo "Boss" Dowling....

"Boss Dowling" is in charge of the unions in the city, as well as approximately 1/2 of The City Council. It's said that he runs both groups with an iron fist.

The political candidates that he backs usually get elected whether they were favored or not. It's not uncommon for certain areas to have lots more votes than registered voters but you know…mistakes can happen…

Everyone pays their union dues, whether they are members of the union or not.

While he usually lets his boys handle the "dirty jobs", he's not above getting his hands dirty by applying a red hot clothing iron to the side of someones face to teach him (and others) a lesson about "Messin' wit him." and to let folks know "Who's the boss…"

He likes good cigars, good bourbon, good horses, and good women.

For him the definition of "good women" can leave a lot to the imagination of many a man…

That's only some of the figs I have painted up right now....

I'll be posting more, (and hopefully painting more) in the near future....

If "Life" doesn't get in the way too much.....

Thanks for checking it out!

Little Wars 2014....A review....

Dear Readers;
This is wordy, long, and photo intensive....Get a drink and relax before proceeding...
Thanks!

The 2014 Little Wars Game Convention held by the HMGS Midwest was once again held at the DuPage Expo Center in St. Charles Illinois...
My wife (Gawd bless her!), and myself decided to make a long weekend of it.
I cursed myself silently for not pre-registering, but will do so next year.

This year instead of taking I-65N all the way to Gary Indiana, (gak), and making a left and then selling two or three pints of my blood to pay the road tolls, we decided to take a left just past Lafayette Indiana, and take 29W past Remington and into Illinois from there.
My wife noticed a set of kitchen chairs for sale, as we passed through the small town of Goodland, that "would match our new table perfectly!"...Unfortunately we were on a schedule. I promised that we would look at them on our way back on Sunday. (Unfortunately they weren't there...)
We came up from the South and through Kankakee, (which honestly didn't impress me that much)...and then around and eventually hit the freeway going in.
Last year we spent almost twenty dollars in tolls going to and from the convention, (as well as seeing the wonderful South Side of Chicago, and public service announcement billboards on prostitution), this year due to our change in course, we only spent six going one way (although the signs do lie, (one sign said toll .90, and then found out it was 3.80!), and I made it a challenge to leave the area on Sunday and pay no tolls...and we had a nice scenic drive...

Unlike last time we went for a day, this time we decided on the weekend.
I was able to get a room across the street at The Pheasant Inn Resort. Little Wars usually has room blocks going on there, and luck was with me, as I was able to get not one of the standard rooms but one of the tower suites. These are $270.00 a night rooms and I got it for the con price.
To be honest, the rooms are a little dated, and I don't think they are worth 270 bucks a night, but they are nice.

Registration went well and pretty speedy although prices at the door for non-HMGS members have gone up some.

So we received our programs....

This years program. These books are always well done...BRAVO!!!!

And I took a gander to see what was going on....and what to register for....
Flames of War was having some type of major area tournament there, so there was going to be a bunch of FoW games going on. This was something that didn't interest me. While I buy some of their stuff, and yes...I participated in their 40% off Vietnam sale, (sigh), I don't play FoW at all.

So we wandered around the place, (pretty much laid out like last time), and bought a few items....

This was the wife's Friday night haul...

For that evening she picked up one of those little handy-dandy magnifiers with clips to hold small fiddly pieces, and she got herself some nice purple flowers for groundwork and some nice white topped flowers, (I see pretty meadows in my future battlefields), and a camel and some horses from Uncle Dukes minis table....

Meanwhile I sucked it up and just bought three packs of figs...

Two packs of Crusader Minis Pirates, and one of "Old West Foreigners"...Gotta have a gunfighter in a kilt! Oh yeah....Ol' Angus McHaggis packing his sporran and two six shooters....

So on Friday night the wife did better me in the "stuff buying"....

We then retired for the night for dinner (Jambalaya restaurant at the Pheasant Run is nice but too pricey I believe and our waiter was a bit pushy on trying to get us to order the drink specials...).

We retired to our room for the evening and prepared for Saturday....

Saturday came bright and early (as usual), and I was up and ready to go. My wife was in "lounge mode" so she bid me a fond farewell!...
Off I trekked, ready to do my duty...
But was quickly diverted by the breakfast buffet directly to the right outside of the elevators...hmmmm....

Now with belly full....I was off and ready to do my duty....

Upon entering the area, I noticed that this year HMGS Mid-West decided to change the hours and times of "The Flea Market". This year they ran the flea market in off hours when the dealers were not open. Though some people whined about it, I think it's a fair and decent thing to do for the dealers. Of notice is that the Saturday evening flea market seemed the prime one....
I bought nothing out of there...and too many people made me feel like I was in a cattle chute.

So I took some pics of the general convention area:

The dealers area on Saturday before opening...

As you can see the place was filled nicely with gamers and games. Fortunately the all too familiar "Gamey gamer smell" wasn't as prevalent as in days past. Although present, I think some of the worst offenders didn't show up, or had been introduced to soap and water....

A quick look at Saturdays events board...

Now I will admit that I DO like the way they have the event board set up. I'm not too sure about how to register for events. Seems that for those that didn't preregister, and did a walk up, you had to wait until one hour before the game you wanted to play started. You then told the guy the event # and he handed you an event ticket if there some available...

Some of the games that looked really cool filled up fast, and some of them were also ALL DAY (5+hour events).

An example of this was the "German Invasion of Oak Ridge Tennesse"...a wonderfully campy pulpy game, that had Nazis, cops, the Army, Aliens, Hillbillies, Townsfolk and all sorts of Iron Sky type madness going on all at once....

"Look! Up in da sky!!!! Is that a....????"

"Nazi's in their V3's from "The Dark Side of The Moon"....

A shot showing the entire table....

The local fire department and pest control....

There were tons of other games also....

One enterprising person was putting on a "Steampunk Time Traveller" game, (in which the game table was divided into four seperate game/time areas). One was Oriental, Once was Ancient Egyptian, One was kind of Steampunkish Europe and the other was a Seaside dockside...

I myself was fascinated by it and took a few pics to get some terrain and scenic ideas for my future pulp/horror/victorian/colonial games.

(Click on the pics to get a larger photo)....

 

 

 


Meanwhile I got myself involved in Uncle Dukes 25mm Alamo Game...

As Jim Bowie holding the Western Wall....

If you don't know what this building is....You need a history lesson....and don't ever go to Texas....

To be honest, I had wanted to play in an Alamo game since last year...and I was looking forward to it. The rules were relatively simple, but my fun was quashed by my opponent who felt the need to cheat and finally 'admitted" it at the end of the game....(more on that later)....

Uncle Duke...2 years past his expiration date...and a nice setup...

The immortal 18 lb'er on the SW parapet...

My West Wall...It would take my opponent to resort to cheating to be able to reach it...and he would...

Part of the attacking force of General Cos hitting me on the West Wall. By rules these were all musket men and needed a 7 or higher on an 8 sided dice to hit.  He had one unit of Lights, (which needed a 7 or higher to hit on a 10 sided dice.), Strangely enough after turn 2 ALL of his men suddenly became D10 "lights" and we only caught it AFTER he cleared the wall...and when the game was called, he ended up admitting it....Sad to have to cheat...

Mexican casualties are mounting in the second turn...(and the first obvious cheat is about to happen as pictured here and below...)

Here you see the Mexican Assault force with the ladders charging straight in to the west wall...right infront of my 9 lb gun. When I measured for cannister shot and they were easily in the template, my opponent suddenly said "Wait..these guys aren't really there...and picked them up and moved them....That was the first "What the H*ll?" moment....The enjoyment of this game soon went away as he started playing "the rules" and not "the game"...

  

Here you can see the recently "relocated" assault ladders OUT of the cannister template, as the Mexican column closes in on the West Wall. Notice that the guys in the green hats up against the wall were the only ones supposed to be using D10's...everyone eles in this photo (Mexican),. was using D8.  Strangely enough....they were all using D10's...

Which eventually resulted in the death of myself (Bowie) on the West Wall....So I left in disgust. May the gods save me from cheaters and rules lawyers.

I found out later that the umpires had been notified but it was too late in the game to do anything about it as it would requre the entire side of the table to "replay" 2 turns...Ah well...hope he's happy.

After this fiasco, my wife and I wandered back around the dealer area while she checked things out. And here I want to vent about something....dealers and their attitudes...

VENT: Dealers...I know you are dealing with lots of people. But please try to put on a professional courteous expression. Don't sit behind your table with your arms crossed and a nasty scowl on your face.  When a customer is looking at your wares don't walk right up to them and say "Something I can help you with?" and glare at them; and if they say "No thanks. I know what I am looking for." Don't just glare at them angrily and turn around and walk off in a huff. Really, if you don't want to be there, and don't want to deal with people...well damnit...don't rent table space....

I promise that unless prodded, I won't "name and shame" this time...since it was only one dealer, and each time I asked a question they acted like I was bothering them.  So I saw some nice stuff that I would like to have gotten from them....but due to their attitudes, I took my money elsewhere...

Meanwhile my wife was discussing the Leonardo Flying Machine Game and thoroughly fascinated by it....

She's a lover of the strange and unusual...after all, she married me!!!!

After making a long visit with Forrest Harris, who seems to be in cahoots with my wife to get me to spend money, plus talk scenery, (He truly is a really nice guy), we checked out the 6 pm pulp game to find out it was filled. Ah well...back to Culvers for dinner and for loot checking...

My wife's swag for the Saturday night...dice, scenics, (more treasure piles), and a Millenium Falcon...

We finally headed out Sunday morning and took an adventuresome run through small country state roads and through Joliet, to get out of the highway robbery activity that is more commonly known as "The Illinois Toll System"....

Once home we tallied up the loot...

Her finally loot tally for both nights once we got home....

She made out pretty good....

So I looked at mine....(remember that she "enabled" me by telling me that "I needed these"...)....

That's a pretty big haul of Knuckleduster and Blue Moon figs....yowza!!!

So I then went ahead and did the final "loot tally" photo....

And then cried when I think about how much we spent....

And how my little lead pile has grown yet again....

The final results of this years "Little Wars haul...."

Final result and observations:

Little Wars is a good convention for the Midwest US. Some people on TMP says that they think it was lighter than last year, but I didn't see that. I know that FoW took up a lot of space, and to be honest, I am thinking that if the con is going to get any bigger they are going to need a new location. It's pretty much maxed out the way it is right now.

The Dealers area seemed slightly lighter this year that last, but OG, Knuckleduster, and others were there. For the one dealer....dude...be nice to people..you might have more business...

There were a lot of games but I also noticed a few cancellations.

I like the way the flea market worked at not competing with the dealers. Although some folks didn't like it, I don't think it is fair for dealers to pay for tables at their cost and then have to compete with flea market guys during peak hours.

All in all, I do like the con, and the only real negative that I can come up with (which really can't be addressed without a major change), is the fact that St. Charles Illinois simply isn't an easy route to get to from "down South (ie: Indiana, etc...)

I'll be going back next year, since I became an HMGS-Midwest member and will support the con by running a game.

If anyone has any ideas, comment, opinions, on this post, please let me know, and if you would like to get in on a fun convention, try this one out.

A brief overview of my gaming history.... Part I

Part I: In which the author discovers that as a child he liked playing with toy soldiers and had a strange keen interest in history and all things militarily silly....

First off, I would like to thank Mark Kinsey, of the blog: "Daddys Little Men", for the inspiration behind this to finally get it up and on site. I had been thinking about this for a while now and like usual, put the idea on the backburner. It was Mark's post that made me say, "I need to do the same thing". You can find more about his gaming history here: http://daddyslittlemen.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-gaming-history.html

Since this is a pretty long post (with text AND pictures!), I think you might want to get a drink and get comfortable, let me know when you are ready to proceed...

Ready?, Right then. Off we go!

I've been a gamer in some ways, for longer than I can think of.
Well...I have to take that back. I've been a gamer for a long time.
To be honest, I've always been interested in "toy soldiers", "little army men", etc...and even to this day I have quite a collection of painted (and mostly unpainted), figures, and all the sheer magnitudes of accessories that goes with them: vehicles, aircraft, terrain, scenics, buildings, rules and charts, and more...always more.

From my very first days that I can remember, I've always had "toy soldiers". As a wee young boy, I can tell you that they were the generic "green army men", that we are pretty much familiar with. But boy did I have them. LOTS of them...At one point I had two brown paper grocery shopping bags full of just men, (not to mention tanks, helicopters, trucks, jeeps, guns, etc...). I think at one point I probably had a larger more powerful force than certain third world nations.

And they fought...

Lord how they fought...

Massive battles fought in the yard...Walls and fighting positions made out of freshly mown grass, and roads scraped into dirt. Rivers, and trees...rocks to fight behind...the ever present dog hearing the noise and curious as to what is going on, and blundering with his big paws into the middle of my battlefield, and destroys my destructive masterpiece.

Gods...when I think about how many green army men that I sent to their imaginary deaths in combat, I would've been charged by court martial as a butcher, and hanged. In fact, in todays "enlightened educational systems", some overconcerned school "child guidance expert" would've been horrified to see me throw masses of riflemen in futile charges against enemy machinegun nests, the little plastic bodies piling up...They would've said that I regarded life as "cheap", and that I was needing "special attention and medication". (They like to give kids pills these days to zombify them, instead of disciplining them...), and even though I would've protested that "Hey! It worked for Stalin!" That would've gone over their ivory towered heads...

But enough about child psychology...and back to toy soldiers and stuff...

When I was about nine, I went with my mother one day to the K-Mart off of Midlothian Turnpike in Richmond Virginia. It was an amazing place it was. A store that was well lit and friendly and you could see all the stuff and not get lost. (Richmond used to have two massive department stores called Kings and Carousel, and I got lost in Kings one time...it wasn't a pretty sight...) But it was that K-Mart that I got sight of them for the very first time...

And in the end I came home with two boxes of them...

A box of the Kaisers boys with their bolt action rifles and their uber cool spiky helmets, (which I always thought that they could use as a last chance weapon, sort of like a bayonet if needed be...) vs.....

The United States Marine Corps ready to storm ashore a Japanese held island somewhere in the South Pacific and lay awesome carnage onto the little yellow SOB's...Semper Fi Baby...

Now, you may be wondering "Why on earth would he have WWII US Marines FIGHTING WWI German Infantry (Circa 1914-1915) ???"

The answer? ....Don't worry about it. 
Really, don't. See as a small child (9 years old), some of my battles with these guys would make historical revisionists either green with envy or weep in shame....

No...truthfully, it was the fact that A: I was 9 years old, and they were soldiers....SOLDIERS by golly! Ready for combat and ready for action, and all they needed was a charismatic leader like me to lead them to victory and glory, (well the USMC at least...the Huns were there to make a show and to get brutally taken out courtesy of the M-1 Garand...)

Also, it should be said that while K-Mart had them, they didn't have a very big selection, at the time, so you got what you could get and you sucked it up and waited for more.

And more would come...over the years I would pick up WWII German Infantry, (they were slimmer and better armed than their WWI daddies), British Eighth Army, Russian Infantry (these were purple for some reason), WWII Japanese, (Finally! The guys to fight the Marines that were waiting to storm ashore on that island), along with Paratroopers, Commandos, and "Combat Infantry"...(which I could never really figure out WHICH side they belonged to, other than perhaps either US or Britain because they were green)...

And of course I would get tanks, and jeeps, and helicopters, etc from Toys R Us, or K-Mart, or whatever...It didn't matter if they were WWII Japanese with a King Tiger and two Leopard 1's in support vs WW1 British Infantry and WWII USMC backed up with Eighth Army support weapons, and fielded a US M60A1, M551 Sheridan, and a JS-II for support, (along with a UH-1 Huey and P-51 to make those wonderful strafing runs)...by golly, these were men of war! Ready for action! Ready to march forward and to conquer or die.

I've come to realize after all of these years that I think my cavalier attitude on sending troops into certain doom and destruction on the miniature battlefields that I play on today were developed on the "training grounds" with Airfix.
I am rarely reluctant to withhold men from the grinder. In my mind, it's "They know what they have to do, and they understand."
Then again, I think I would never have had any problems launching an ICBM at a country on orders of the president...I would've turned my switched, and pushed the button...WOO HOO!!!!

Sorry, went off on a little tangent there...

Deep down though, something was bugging me as a kid. And that was the fact that there had to be something more to do with these figures than send them once again into the slaughterhouse. In fact, somewhere in my mind, my brain was crying for "More!".

At the time I was a WWII nut, (well in my mind I was). Growing up, I had soaked my brain in every issue of "Our Army At War, featuring Sgt. Rock and Easy Company", comics, along with "The Losers", "The Unknown Soldier", and one of my favorites "The Haunted Tank"...
I had also read "Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos", but in reality, they didn't do anything for me, as Marvel Comics had a bad sense of making every character have some type of special superhero feat or individualism which set him off from the other one, (Kind of like the X-Men of today, the "Howlers", were the X-Men of WWII...) Strangely enough, also like in todays Marvel Comics, you never really saw anyone die in Sgt. Fury. His men would battle the Nazi goons through 10 pages and with bullets and explosions, but with the exception of some character baddie etc, the body count for "WWII according to Stan Lee", was pretty low...
DC on the other hand...there was lots of it...GI's and Krauts shook off their mortal coil at an alarming rate. It was pretty much guaranteed that just about any new character introduced into a storyline in Sgt Rock was going to buy the farm. Some did survive more than one issue, but most of them didn't...
I also watched every war movie that I could at the time. CBS used to do late night movies back in the days of local programming, and usually on Friday or Saturday nights at 10:30, I would sit up, and fight to stay awake to watch Kelly's Heroes, or Tora Tora Tora!, or something.

And school was no different. When my class would go to the library to get books, most of my classmates would get thin books on sports, cars, or if you were a girl, you would get a book on horses...Horses were popular with girls back then. I never figured out why, but then again I was too busy thumbing through the American Heritage Book "Air War; Against Hitlers Germany", and looking at the pictures of flak damaged B-17s that barely made it back from a run over the ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt, or the famous picture of the B-24s making their low run over the Ploesti Oil Fields to pay attention to "why girls liked books on horses."

As I grew older and moved to Texas, I discovered the temple to consumerism, also known as "The Shopping Mall". It was at "Toys By Roy", (Later known as Kaybee Toys), that I discovered these...

They were sitting on a shelf and back then they were known as "Bookcase games", due to the fact that they could be stored on a bookcase and actually in a sense sometimes looked like a nice set of 2 volume boxed hardbacks, (if you could get past the swastika, or some other symbol or name)...

Instead of soldiers, they had little cardboard counters....hundreds of them....

So I was hooked...

In those days it was hard to find anyone my age, (actually anyone), that would play these games with me. Living in a small town in Texas at the time, one had to understand that "If'n it weren't high school football, then it was something else below the line of social acceptance." So needless to say a lot of my games, (almost all of them) were solo...

I learned how to read rules, and move, and stack counters, and I played many a horrible solo game against myself....
But I had fun...

And sitting there next to Panzerblitz and Panzerleader was one that called out to me, like a siren does to a ship at sea....

"BUGS MR RICO! MILLIONS OF THEM!!!

I spent many an hour in solo games pitting the Mobile Infantry against the Bugs, (and sometimes The Skinnies), and enjoyed it...

Still...

And for Christmas, I got this....

 

Oh my Dear Lord...

Now I could spend hours and hours MORE playing a large wargame...
With nobody....
And I opened it up and looked at the board...

From the Atlantic to the Urals...Glory would be mine....

And so I spent many a long hour, afternoon, evening, weekend days, WEEKENDS...reading, re-reading, re-re-reading the rule book which explained everything (though sometimes not very well as in the Uboat attrition rules), and playing against myself and refighting WWII.'

Come to think of it, I don't think I ever really finished one of the Third Reich games that I started. Somewhere eventually, I think one side of me would throw my hands up in the air in quick surrender fashion (brought on and coming into vogue in Italy in 1943), and call it a day.

But it did "feed the strange need" I had for a while....

And even though there were "BIG" wargames out there....not all of them were A: Affordable to a young boy, B: Understandable and enjoyable...or C: Playable....

Ladies and gentleman to illustrate my previous point, allow me to introduce you to exhibit "A":

 

NATO Division Commander by SPI (The Brainchild of self proclaimed military and international affairs expert James Dunnigan, (more on him later)).... So big...so unplayable....I still have a copy on my self somewhere that was given to me...


However Avalon Hill was not to be outdone no....

They came up with their own Colossus Frankenstein thing....

And by now I was thoroughly confused....but still trying....


To be continued in Part II......