Wars Across The World

Petty cool, not exactly an old school war game but still worth playing. I would like to see whole campaigns if that is possible. Island hopping in the Pacific and the European theater...

The concept is *fantastic*: learn one board wargame rules set and be able to play operational/strategic campaigns from literally *any* historical era.** That said, that rules set is a snarling b!tch to learn (and this from a half-century veteran of tabletop and computer wargames). The in-game tutorial shows little more than how to move units. To learn the game you'll need to suffer through a long, badly-proofread translated manual which reads like neither the original writer nor the translator were proficient in *either* language. BUT... Once you've read the manual and played a couple of games to get a handle on the rules mechanics and the sequence of play, you're in for a treat. It's true that no two plays of a scenario will ever be the same, not just because of each player's card deck and dice-driven combat, but because the A.I. reacts differently from game to game. I've played the Caesar 58BC scenario (in which the AI moves first) about ten times now, and I've seen the AI execute at least three different Turn One-Two plans (presumably because of different card draws each time). Bear in mind, this is no "The Operational Art of War". The complexity here is about a 4 on the standard wargame 1-10 scale. It's made a bit difficult to learn because of the manual's presentation, not because it's an inherently difficult game. And if you wait for the half-price sales to buy Season Packs of scenarios, you can enjoy a LOT of different wargames for the price of a single GMT/Compass tabletop game -- and not have to learn a brand-new set of rules each time. **This was a sort of "grail quest" for tabletop wargame companies back in the day (SPI's "Strategy I"/Yaquinto's "Battle: The Game of Strategy"). These failed to deliver primarily because they *were* generic; different periods lacked period flavor. Wars Across the World avoids this trap by a) using different graphics for different periods and b) devising scenario-specific rules to better represent the challenges of the campaign in question.

Quite buggy at times but i still like it, a lot