Squad Leader

Has anyone here played the 4 module version of cardboard fighting for WWII?

Squad Leader is a very good game to enjoy with a friend or two while drinking beer and eating your favorite snack foods.

I've enjoyed this game for about 30 years now.

Anyone else?

 

Squad Leader was a good try by Avalon Hill. The problem was that they did the rules like a bunch of lawyers would make law. They started with a reasonable idea and then beat it to death. Every time a problem came up they made a new exception (rule). Soon the game was a mass of rules.
This is great if you can rules lawyer your opponet or play in tournaments (me). You can simply come up with something that the other guy doesn't know about everytime he tries to do something to win. It bogs down into an argument. That isn't much fun.
What they should have done is simplify. Reduce the rules to work in "reality" rather than in an artificial enviroment.
I've beaten the living daylights out lots of people with this game. The last was a professor of military history and ex-Army major who loved the game. He was stunned by my crafty use of the rules against him. That is, taking advantage of certain special cases, taking advantage of the turn sequence, taking advantage of the scenario etc.
I prefer miniatures myself to the cardboard version like squad leader.

Oh, I did have several discussions with the AH guys over this at various conventions back in the day.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I know the difficulties fo all the rules, but have simplified them to make the real world tactics work on the terrain.

I have asked many players who no longer play to send me their games. I now have 10 sets of Squad Leader & Cross of Iron, 4 sets of Crescendo of Doom and GI; Anvil of Victory. I also have over 150 map boards (including 10 river boards). Enough counters to have a good Stalingrad re-enactment.
Thanks.

 

Kevin, you might peruse my responses in this thead. PKA was developed specifically because games like SL/ASL couldn't reproduce history.

http://www.ww2f.com/simulations-gaming/18938-ww2-miniature-wargame-rules.html

 

Thanks for the link.

I'll have to read it tomorrow.

Good night all.

 

TA it lokks like you missed the best of the fun, AH went on to publish Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) the ultimate rules lawyer game with over 100 pages of rules in a 2Kg binder with clauses, sub clauses exceptions and in a couple of instances scenario specific rules over a page long by themselves dictating exceptions to the exceptions in the standard rules. True "hog heaven" for the rules lawyers but impossible to keep up with for someone like me who likes to try multiple systems in search of historical insights. What I most liked about it was that the system actually worked so that if you got with your initial setup (battle plan) wrong you were very likely to loose but once the dice started rolling anything could happen (no plan survives contact with the enemy). BTW I believe they are still publishing modules for ASL but with a different company (and every module has additional rules to add to the binder).

 

I've got 2 sets of each but am in the same boat as Slip. Have not played in a very long while.

 

Thanks for all that have posted.

I enjoy reading stories to invent SL scenarios.

I have never had any scenarios published, but have enjoyed playing them for close to 30 years now.