Axis and Allies Anniversary - Part one

Our first look into the Black Vault and it's an epic one.


Axis and Allies Anniversary edition is a big game by any definition. It contains over 600 plastic pieces, the board is 120cm long by 60cm wide and the box is big enough to house at least 5 refugee families. When set up it takes up the roughly the same space as a football field and several real wars have had shorter play lengths.

Well some of that is exaggeration.  

I set out on an epic journey, and adventure of sorts to paint this beast. All 600 models, all 7 factions, all to a good standard and all historically accurate while still being game useful. One Month in and there were 500 models left to paint, three months in I wanted to tear my eyes out, Five months in it was done. If it wasn't for the praise and motivation given by the good people at axis and allies.org , especially Imperious Leader who liked the project so much it made the post a sticky, and Viracocha who liked the project so much he started his own impressive project (See his pictures by following the link above).

It was a long tortuous experience that left me reluctant to take on another project this size.

That was until I set the game up that is.

This made it all worth while. I tried getting a shot of the whole game set up but doing that means you can't see anything on the board. These two shots give you an idea of the grandeur and scale of this mighty game. The tragedy is I've only ever played online and never actually used my real set in anger :(

I rationalize this by saying that the intent was always to paint the game as a painting project, but really one day i would like to sit down and play this thing. Until then it sits on a shelf, fully painted but under used.

And no, I don't plan to put it on ebay.

This is the full tray of pieces, all 600+ painted, I even got the Field Marshall games special dice for those final touches on this project.

In coming weeks I will go through the individual nations have have a closer look at their units. I will be posting those up in turn order (For those who haven't played that means Germany is first)