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Axis & Allies by TripleA

// April 27th, 2009 // Gaming

Back in high school my friends and I were big into a number of strategy “board” games such as Risk, Red Storm Rising, Supremacy and our ultimate favorite, Axis & Allies. With the exception of Risk, the games were extremely complicated, required an obscene amount of table top space, and generally went on for hours. All of that being said, the games themselves were immensely satisfying from an intellectual perspective. While there was always an element of chance to the games, much of your success (or failure) was directly attributed to the manner in which you (or your opponents) played the game.

We’re all grown up (physically anyways) with families, demanding jobs, and limited free time, but a number of us recently got together played a game of Axis & Allies a couple weeks ago. Needless to say we had a blast and while we’d like to get together more often, the facts of life often get in the way. A couple of the guys mentioned that there were a number of ways you can play the game online, and I decided to look into it myself. The first thing I came across was the site GameTableOnline and signed up. That’s when I learned that their software was Windows only. I was just about to give up when I came across TripleA.

TripleA is an open source (yeah!) game engine designed primarily to bring Axis & Allies-esque gameplay to the computer. Fortunately, for me the software is written in Java and as such can technically be run on any OS that supports the language. I am, however, not about to test this theory and stuck to the canned installer for the Mac. Installing the stable release (1.0.0.3) was crazy simple and I was up and playing in a matter of minutes. The biggest shock to me was discovering the large number of mods/scenarios included with the game. It would appear that the game has a number of user created maps and scenarios for a wide array of game experiences, but I was more interested in some good wholesome A&A fun and quickly fired up the revised edition of the game. The experience was quite good and true to the revised rules. Once I played a few rounds of the revised game, I fired up the classic edition and was quickly brought back to how the game played the first time we ever opened up a box and started to play.

Over the past couple of days, I have played about 20 games of either the revised and classic boards and can tell you that it did a pretty good job of filling the void. The only problem would have to be the stone cold stupidity of the AI. This is where the beauty of TripleA really comes in. The game supports network play and even includes the capability to connect to a lobby where you can browse and join games. You can even host a PBEM (Play by E-Mail) game, but it seemed like a lot more work than it is worth. I haven’t tried the network play as of yet, as I’m still recruiting some of my A&A buddies to the software so that we can give it a proper try. I’ll certainly post my findings.

In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the main interface.

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