And in gaming, like in every other area of life, some opinions have value, and some don’t. I was utterly crushed after my defeat, but in retrospect, that drubbing was the best thing that could have happened to me at the timebecause, from that moment on, I stopped treating other players’ pronouncements as facts, but started seeing them for what they really were: nothing more than personal opinions. defenders like a “rented mule” in a PBM game of WATERLOO, thirty-five years ago. That all changed, however, when a retired Army officer in Florida beat my P.A.A. Why not? I had only been involved in the hobby for a few years, and I didn’t know any better. Ironically enough, during my early years in the hobby I tended to believe most of this silly claptrap. In fact, I wish that, over the years, I had put aside a dollar for every occasion on which I heard some other player declare that the Germans absolutely could not win in STALINGRAD, or the French in WATERLOO, or that the Americans had no chance in MIDWAY, etc. For this reason and others, after forty-plus years of pushing “baby blue” and “frou-frou pink” counters back and forth across the AFRIKA KORPS game map in both competitive and casual venues, I find myself disagreeing with almost all of the core assumptions that underpin this criticism of the game.įirst, a little gaming history: AFRIKA KORPS is not the only one of Avalon Hill’s older games that has been dogged by this kind of off-hand, popular criticism. In fact, in the vast majority of these cases, I would argue that both players - not just the Axis commander - have to be complicit in this low-odds Axis gamble for the attack to actually go forward. And even in tournament situations, the likelihood of a game-ending 1 to 1 against Tobruch has more to do with the personalities and goals of both the Axis and the Commonwealth players, than it does with the game itself. In reality, these low-odds AFRIKA KORPS tournament finales derive more from the peculiar nature and special pressures of convention play than they do from any feature intrinsic to the game for this reason, these attacks will tend to show up far more frequently in tournament competition than in either regular face-to-face or PBeM play. So, if this is the case, this particular criticism of the game must be valid, right? Wrong. AFRIKA KORPS contests - particularly, face-to-face tournament matches - are frequently decided by a big Axis 1 to 1 attack on Tobruch.
Perception versus Reality Obviously, this prejudice against AFRIKA KORPS is fairly wide-spread among gamers or I wouldn’t be discussing it here moreover, there is, to be fair, a kernel of truth contained in this criticism of one of Avalon Hill’s oldest games. For my own part, if I really believed that any game was completely luck dependent, I’d enter that game’s tournament in a heartbeat, and then simply try to die-roll my way to a tournament plaque! But I digress. This position, I think at least, represents a very curious point of view. This is also the main reason, these critics explain, why they personally no longer play AFRIKA KORPS they don’t want to waste their time on a game the outcome of which can be reduced to a single lucky die-roll. In the eyes of many of AFRIKA KORPS’ most vocal critics, this possibility is sufficient - in and of itself - to eliminate the game from consideration as a real test of skill and to label it, instead, as an ancient hobby relic that is little more than a desert variant of Yahtzee.
I am referring, of course, to the built-in possibility of a low-odds (either 1 to 1 or 1 to 2) Axis assault against Tobruch at any point after the first few months of the game. IntroductionOne of the oldest and most persistent bits of gaming “folk wisdom” that has attached itself to AFRIKA KORPS, both as a game and as a historical simulation, is that the final outcome of the entire thirty-eight turn campaign can be, and usually is, decided by a single roll of the die. Perception, Reality, and Luck: the Low-Odds Ploy against Tobruch