TripleA

Game #2: TripleA. It's actually just a clone of good ol' Axis and Allies, written in Java. A&A is a WWII game, where each player controls a nation (or in two player games, the Axis or the Allies), and you build armies of units like bombers and tanks to conquer your enemy's territory. The implementation is excellent, and you can pick from the default version that I'm used to playing, the revised edition that has a different map and adjusted rules, or a handful of other variants and maps, and mix and match the optional rules as well. You can choose from playing a local game, hosting an online game, or running a play-by-email game, and the AI is reasonably competent. It's a great-looking game, and definitely one that benefits from automation. I just played a game where Germany had over 125 units on a single territory; there's not enough units or space on the board for that kind of scale in the physical version.

It would be nice if there were some in-game summary of each unit's capabilities, especially since depending on the gametype you pick, that can change around. You can see all of that information in different places while playing the game (like, in combat, each side's units are organized by their attack or defense role), but I kept trying to right-click on a unit to bring up a little window with its attack, defense, cost, and movement -- but it never happened.

Another minor complaint is that moving units is a little simplistic. There are certain territories that you can't move through, or would prefer to go around, and simply clicking on a unit's destination won't always realize that, say, you'd prefer to fly your bombers around the anti-aircraft guns. You can move a unit more than once each round as long as it hasn't reached its movement limit, so it's not hard to just manually move it one territory at a time if you need, but it'd be nice if you could hold down CTRL or something to specify the path you want to use.

But here's my only major nitpick: it loses points for having no documentation that I can find. This is probably a legal thing -- I know some game companies don't like having their rules published online, though I can't imagine Avalon Hill is too keen on having the whole game published online either. But I can't seem to find any docs on just how to use the game, never mind play it, and for all I know there are ways to do both those things I mentioned that I just haven't come across them. But if you don't mind figuring out that kind of thing on your own, it's definitely been put together well.