World War II

What could be more fun than a few friends and world domination? As baby is nearing, we took a day off for one last battle of Axis & Allies, 50th Anniversary edition. Of course, it was one day of conquests and defeats, but a week's worth of collaboration and strategizing with our respective alliances.

The true nature of everyone came out. CR's true computer science side peeked through with his laptop and his own battle outcome statistic generator program that calculates the percentage of victory based on probability of dice rolls. He did not code into account everybody's luck factor though. Ryan and Curt had pretty solid scoring rolls. Jon and Rob had the usual kamikaze outcomes.

The battles begun at 10am sharp with breakfast bagels, donuts, coffee... which slowly evolved into Red Bull, beer, and munchies through the course of 8 hours play. Japan(me) took over Burma and was slowly moving into India, while keeping US naval on its toes in the Pacific. Italy(Ryan) had made its way into Africa and the Persian Gulf, to threaten Russia(Rob) from the south. U.S (Jon) was a force to be reckoned with as the sheer size and IPCs allowed it to battle the Pacific as well as Europe. The main teetering of domination however was in Europe as land kept being conquered and then re-conquered between Germany (CR), Russia (Rob), and U.K. (Curt). Daylight soon gone, no victory for either side was in sight. I guess even with all our planning and relatively early start - we still under-estimated the time for completion.. again!

CR has a much better post about the play-to-play individual war strategies on his blog.