Axis & Allies Revised Edition
Revised Edition, released 2004 by Hasbro / Avalon Hill
Axis & Allies
Original Edition, released 1987 by Milton Bradley Gamemaster Series

I've been playing Axis & Allies, original edition, since approximately 1993. This year for Christmas I received a copy of Axis & Allies, revised edition. Until recently I had only read about the map and rule changes. My brother and I managed to squeeze in a game Christmas day (and well into the night). To cut to the chase, I'm a fan of the changes to the game itself and not a big fan how light the cardboard on some of the new pieces is. I'm not going to endeavor a full on detailed explanation of the game and detailed review. If you're looking looking for that Tom Vasel has a detailed write up that gives you lots of detail.

In my estimation my brother and I are pretty experienced and sophisticated players of A& A both having about 10 years of play behind us and most of the time against on another. In the original version it was more or less a fore gone conclusion that the longer the game went on the higher the chance that the Allies would win as long as Russia made life difficult for Germany and the US keeps a modest amount of pressure on Japan to keep them blowing IPC's on a navy. The new version balances that out in several ways. First, the re-jiggering of Eastern Europe, splitting the Caucus into two spaces (Caucus and Belorussia) and putting a factory in Caucus.

This makes it possible for the Germans to do some real strategic damage to the Russians and gives them a possible land passage to North Africa. This doesn't change the standard Russian strategy of infantry, infantry, infantry but it provides Germany with an effective flanking maneuver and spreads out the Russian infantry into more spaces making it a more even fight. Also, the increase in defensive capability of the tank makes the German Blitzkreig strategy work. The addition of the Sahara Desert to North Africa makes the German hold on Africa more reasonable and kills the cheap shot Germany used to have of running it's tank all over Africa.

In the Pacific the US Navy is significantly weaker and the Japanese is significantly stronger with a second carrier group. The smaller Islands have shed their IPC value making the US Island hopping strategy be just a strategy for getting within range of Aisia and Japan. I played the Axis against my brother's Allies. Japan was pretty devastating by building a factory on Kwangtung and churning out tanks that allowed it to push the US out of China, take India from the British and capture the Russian East all the way to Russia. He did make one small mistake with the US fleet that set his Pacific efforts back two turns making the Japanese in Asia strategy have an couple extra turns to build momentum.

All in All I'm pleased to have the new version. There are definitely more subtle changes including the addition of a couple new units that I've glossed over. The bottom line is, if you've played the game and moved on, it's time to revisit. If you've never played, you're in for a treat - it's gotten even better. If you're still playing RISK - get a life and trade up.

You know what I'm doing the day after Christmas.

We actually only hit A (Northwestern Christian Thrift - closes at 6PM weekdays) & B (Value Village closes at 9 PM M-Sa). Had a good time. My Brother got a killer outfit for an 80's party he's attending - for New Years I think.

I actually managed to hit the third store on Sprague. Scored some really great stuff. Spokane thrift stores - just keep on giving.

Merry Christmas everyone. Need to make sure my last post before Christmas isn't vitriol. I am at my sisters house in Spokane Washington after quite a traveling ordeal (I'll post about that later). We'll see about getting some photos of my white Christmas (only snow on the ground, does that still count?).

The NY Times (love those guys) have a great slide show about one Jeremy Honey who works as Santa Claus at the Palisades Mall in New Jersey. It's a great slide show and it seems Mr. Honey is a great guy who takes his work as Santa pretty seriously.

At any rate, Merry Christmas to both my readers - you know who you are. :)

In case you're looking for some Christmas tunes - here is what we're listening to courtesy of Pandora.com (love those guys even more.)

This is a follow up post to my other about Hoover and the mass arrests he had planned for 1950

In 1999 (November 30th) during the WTO "riots" in Seattle, I worked in downtown Seattle at 2nd Avenue and Pine street (the Newmark Building) and my office was on second floor on the north side of the building looking down onto Pike between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue. The Pike Place Market was visible to the west and you could see up Pike a block or two to the east.

The WTO meeting was long known to be coming to town and it was widely known that labor groups, etc would be protesting. The first day into the meeting there were loud protests on the street but nothing felt unsafe. I went out for lunch and walked among the thousands of people choking off traffic from the downtown streets. As it turns out I witnessed some of the activity that kicked off all the property destruction and chaos. The anarchists (black block ) who were busy pushing a dumpster into the intersection of Pike and 3rd Avenue to light it on fire and then watched them slink away down a side street. It wasn't really scary to be in the crowds, but it was getting there.

As I walked around more I found more and more police perimeters, SPD in full riot gear in a shoulder to shoulder line with shields and batons blocking off streets. Actually, I have to give credit where it's due. The Seattle Police department riot gear was masterfully designed to be intimidating. Great gladiatorial stuff with pads to look like huge muscles and wide shoulders, knee high boots with massive black leg guards.

By then 3pm the situation on the ground was enough that the office closed and people left in groups to get to their buses and transportation, but it really wasn't overly unsafe unless you were in one of the regions where the police or the protesters were moving in. The estimates I've seen put 40,000 people on the streets of Seattle. When I tried to go home the buses going to the north weren't actually stopping in downtown, you had to walk several blocks north to Denny. I got home all right.

That evening a "no protest" zone was declared in downtown Seattle containing, more or less, everything from Denny to Columbia and from Elliot Bay to I-5. The next morning (December 1st) when I went to work the buses weren't going into downtown, which had been thrashed by the protesters the day before. I got off the bus at Denny and was going to walk to the office. I carried a backpack with my book and a magazine that I read on the bus and in order to get into the "no protest" zone I had to let police officers peek inside my bag to see that I wasn't carrying I-don't-know-what. That really rubbed me the wrong way, but I acquiesced because I didn't really see the value of getting denied access to work, or worse, arrested for standing up for my rights (unreasonable search and seizure for those of you who don't remember civics).

That afternoon the moonscape of downtown Seattle was punctuated by maneuvers by the police and the protesters. It was all very 17th century warfare - armies lined up across a field. Apparently at some point late in the day the police pushed the protester into Pike Place and the market bearing the same name. This meant they were within sight of my office window. By this time it seems to me that the protester were more or less beaten down by pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets. So when a skirmish appeared below the (sealed) window of my office we were able to watch as the police engaged the protesters. The two images below were not taken by me, but they are pretty dead on with what I saw:

Well for the sake of finishing the story and getting back to something resembling a point, That evening when I left work, downtown Seattle was on lock-down. Downtown was not nearly as crowded, it was more deserted with small pockets of protesters and lines of police in their great but scary looking riot gear. I walked up to Capital Hill and had a snack at B&O Espresso, and then walked up to Broadway to catch the No7 bus to the U-District where I could catch the 35 up to Wedgwood. Apparently because all of the disruption the 7 wasn't running on Capital Hill so I walked toward the north end of Broadway. I made it all the way to a pub near East 10th and Roanake (you know if you keep walking North on Broadway). I had yet to find the No 7 bus, whose route I was walking, and needed a break. I stopped in, got a pint and looked up at the television to see live footage of protesters moving up onto Capitol Hill being clubbed by police. It wasn't quite bedlam, but it definitely wasn't comforting to see that the exact area I had just walked out of was the scene of all that. I called a one my roomates to come pick me up from the pub, according to the local news the action was moving North on Broadway.

It was all very surreal. I remember at the end of it all feeling like the people who came to town for the protest had a lot of nerve showing up and smashing up my city. But that's not really compelling. At the end of it all - some 600 arrests later - I am disappointed in myself that I didn't put up more of a fuss when that darn police man asked to see my bag. And thereby I guess I hold myself complicit to what the courts ended up deciding was a violation of the 4th Amendment.

On January 16, 2004, the city settled with 157 individuals arrested outside of the no-protest zone during the WTO events, agreeing to pay them a total of $250,000.
On January 30, 2007, a federal jury found that the City of Seattle had violated protesters' Fourth Amendment constitutional rights by arresting them without probable cause or hard evidence.

from wikipedia "WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 Protest Activity"

Over the years I've given it some thought, and while I was ticked that a bunch of people had messed up my city, a peek inside my backpack pisses me off more. So, I guess that's why the whole Hoover wanting to go after 12,000 people in 1950 post has that "echo... echo... echo..." portion on the end. This makes me think we're in some sort of civil rights echo chamber. I'm pretty sickened by extraordinary rendition, by gitmo and by wiretapping. I guess instead of Echo echo echo it should read... Manzanar, Hoover's Plan, domestic wire tapping. Haven't we learned yet?

To knee cap a counter argument - Sure sure sure, post 9/11 world... My answer is post Pearl Harbor world... Post China enters Korean War world. Don't worry, I'm not going to rail against the random searches by police of bags and packages entering the subway - they just won't be checking my bag. And apparently I've started blogging about civil liberties

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

This one comes from the "holy-shit batman" department. Is it just me or is the rule of law run a muck at the hands of narrow minded politicians with tyrannical tendencies more frightening than terrorists?

I feel like I've seen something like this in a Sci-Fi movie, but I can't remember which one. At any rate, this sounds great. My building is plainly to small for a virtual doorman and as a consequence I have packages sent to me at work and have to lug them home. I guess the security considerations are not really my primary concern.

Virtual-doorman systems can range from very basic services with a few cameras and an Internet connection that allow the operators to watch a front door and accept packages, to space-age operations with biometric readers that scan fingerprints for entry or electronic tags that don’t even have to be taken out of a pocket to open a door — an E-ZPass, of sorts, for humans. Depending on the level of sophistication and the number of cameras, the services cost $10,000 to $70,000 for installation and $6,000 to $30,000 in annual maintenance.

But Matthew Nerzig, a spokesman for the doormen’s union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, argued that “while cyberdoormen offer building managers a way to cut costs, they obviously can’t compete with actual doorman when it comes to providing professional service and security to tenants.”

Toby A. Ten Eyck, a sociologist at Michigan State University, said the growing acceptance of virtual-doorman services says something about urban living. “We’re always in crowds in the city,” he said, “so people are always watching us at a certain level. Now technology allows us to have cameras everywhere watching what we do, and what’s interesting is we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t care that we’re being watched. We actually like it.”

Which is why residents can find it reassuring when a virtual doorman they have never met calls them by name and opens the door for them, he said. “It’s the ‘Cheers’ mentality of being somewhere where everybody knows your name,” he said, referring to the television show about a Boston bar and its regular customers. “Especially in a city where you’re pretty much an anonymous figure, you just feel good when people know who you are.”

Still, I think this is pretty cool and is a great way to increase quality of life for the people in the building at a fraction of the cost of a person on site. I'm reasonably certain the folks who have a doorman now aren't going to run out and replace them with an "eye-in-the-sky", but this definitely will bring "doormen" to more buildings.

Wow, had no idea this even existed. This strikes me as one of those trickle out things where you can't even begin to predict what the ultimate consequences are. Mr. Tipping Point where are you?

India Overturns Law Banning Women Bartenders

In overturning a 1914 law that prohibited women from tending bar here in the capital, the Supreme Court of India this month not only raised a glass to changing social mores in this country, but also gave Indian women access to one of the most lucrative jobs in the new economy.

A bartender, Ms. Soni has pointed out to her elders, can easily rake in more than $1,000 a month, which is more than triple the salary of a call center worker, for instance, or that of a waitress at a high-end restaurant.

In Mumbai, for instance, India’s entertainment capital, women are prohibited from working in bars past 8:30 p.m., a law so rarely enforced that Shatbhi Basu, a celebrity bartender who is the host of a drinking show on television and teaches a bartending course, was not quite sure when women were supposed to clock out. Many employers ignore the 8:30 p.m. law, she said, but afford their employees safety precautions, like sending them home in a company car.

Nor do the city police seem to enforce another charmingly antiquated regulation that requires drinkers to present a doctor-certified permit that declares them medically in need of drink.