ASL ??

ASL is a WW2 tactical simulation (wargame) formely developed by The Avalon Hill Game Company (TAHGC) and now being produced by MMP on an exclusive license from Hasbro.

Wargames, or simulation games, are like chess that there are two sides "making war" on each other. The difference is that one side usually may move all the pieces belonging to that side instead of only one.

Also the result of an attack is not given, but the result of die/dice roll. We set the values of the chess pieces to: Pawn = 1, Knight / Bishop = 3, Rook = 5 and Queen = 9. And then say before that before taking an opposing figure a 10 sided die (values 1-10) must be rolled, and the the move is only allowed if the die result is less than or equal to the value of the taking figure we are getting close. Thus a Queen has 90% chance of taking figures, the Rooks 50% and so on.

As one can see planning ahead is becoming much more difficult than in chess, as there is no guarantee that the calculated variations will happen. The results of a single take (combat) is also more variable, ranging from eliminated to partly eliminated to broken/routed etc.

I first encountered the concept of simulation games when visiting London at age 13 and saw the game Panzerblitz on display in a toy shop. Being an avid fan of plastic models from the WWII era before it immediately caught my interest, displaying a German JagdPanther on the cover. At this time I was also playing chess tournaments so the gaming aspect appealed to me as well. The rules - a booklet of perhaps 5-6 standard pages in English - turned out to be to complicated, so we discarded most of them. Using only the original counters and combat result tables we played on everything from homemade city boards made of wood to boards from family games like Tjuv & Polis. Thereafter came other simulation games, then played more or less according to the rules.

TAHGC also produces a magazine for its games called The General and it was there I first read an announcement for a new game called Squad Leader. It was in even greater detail than Panzerblitz, where each counter represented a military unit containing many men & vehicles. The SL counters represented single leaders, squads, support weapons and vehicles. Another trip to London! The 4 playing boards in SL are geomorphical, meaning that the edges have the same features at predefined places, thus allowing the boards to be combined in different ways to create larger playing surfaces. The game contains counters representing German, Russian and US units. The SL rules were much more complicated (30+ pages in small print), but were introduced by small heaps for each new scenario, allowing players to train on particular aspect of the rules until ready to continue. This made SL to stand out among complicated games. The first scenarios contained infantry units only with tanks making the entry in scenario 3. I still remember the first moves with the tanks of this scenario, and after this I was definitely hooked.

SL was soon followed by Cross of Iron (COI), a module that contained a new geomorphical board and more detailed rules for handling tanks in a more general way. This was so fun I had to get an extra COI! After it followed Crescendo of Doom and GI Anvil of Victory. These had new boards and more nationalities. GAV was the last module for SL. Favourite SL scenarios includes The Paw of the Tiger, Breakout at Borisova (sp?), Chateau de Quesnoy and one of the river crossing scenarios. We also played a lot DYO (for insiders...).

At this time TAHGC was already planning for an updated version of SL. Since the COI, COD and GAV modules introduced many new rules overriding previous ones, finding the right one soon became complicated. New counters had also been introduced, make older useless with the newer rules. Thus came Advanced Squad Leader into being....