Ah GBOH:Alex - my first wargame. This is an amazing edition; ironically I actually had Tyrant but not the other expansions, so buying this edition was a no-brainer. For the unit colors, my take is that they tend to represent which nation the units came from historically. Sorting them out for storage is a bit weird -- the Macedonians are in the majority of the battles and typically almost all of them are used each time. Whilst the opposition army changes - but the main standard ones are either the Persians or the Indians. The best way I've found is to group them by their nation (with the various allies of Alex put in the same group as the Macedonians), and then group each unit by their type. It will take a lot of containers, but it does make it faster to setup. The rules for this aren't that bad. The cohesion gets a little fiddly with many stacks of counters, but it all makes sense and when you get into it, it's pretty fast paced. The big rules thing for me, once you get the combat system, is remembering what reactions are possible and when. I've tried SGBOH rules, but never got into them. Particularly that you can't rally troops and you can't remove cohesion. This makes crossing a river (which Alex does time and time again) far too painful. Also the game is seemingly designed to use routing followed by rallying as a way for troops to fall back that only the better leaders could orchestrate (due to higher ratings and so easier rallying). With SGBOH nixing that, it changes how to fight some of the battles. To be fair, it does streamline the game, but if I'm playing this kind of game, I kind of want the amount of detail it has.
Get the couple of extra scenario sets and you have ton of value. I just wish SPQR was available, right now its on GMT's P500, slowly getting there maybe next year. :) Thanks for looking at this game. If I might suggest, check the counters as you take them off the spurs to make sure there's no peeling from the counter's core. GMT had some problems with early production copies of this particular game and had to send many people a new set of counters to correct the problem.
I'm a good way into counter-clipping and my set appears OK. Nice, thick counters, too. Unfortunately Tyrant is the one I haven't got, and it seems to be hard/pricy to get. But there's a raft of scenarios at C3i Ops Center... and I have SPQR Deluxe, plus Barbarian, already. So I have enough GBoh content to keep me busy pretty much as long as I like.
The deluxe treatment of this, as well as the new SPQR, makes me wish that GMT would do a deluxe version of Chandragupta too. I vastly prefer the brown core counters and color player aids. But I guess that since there still are new copies of Chandragupta floating around, it must've not sold very well.
Ah GBOH:Alex - my first wargame. This is an amazing edition; ironically I actually had Tyrant but not the other expansions, so buying this edition was a no-brainer.
For the unit colors, my take is that they tend to represent which nation the units came from historically. Sorting them out for storage is a bit weird -- the Macedonians are in the majority of the battles and typically almost all of them are used each time. Whilst the opposition army changes - but the main standard ones are either the Persians or the Indians. The best way I've found is to group them by their nation (with the various allies of Alex put in the same group as the Macedonians), and then group each unit by their type. It will take a lot of containers, but it does make it faster to setup.
The rules for this aren't that bad. The cohesion gets a little fiddly with many stacks of counters, but it all makes sense and when you get into it, it's pretty fast paced. The big rules thing for me, once you get the combat system, is remembering what reactions are possible and when. I've tried SGBOH rules, but never got into them. Particularly that you can't rally troops and you can't remove cohesion. This makes crossing a river (which Alex does time and time again) far too painful. Also the game is seemingly designed to use routing followed by rallying as a way for troops to fall back that only the better leaders could orchestrate (due to higher ratings and so easier rallying). With SGBOH nixing that, it changes how to fight some of the battles. To be fair, it does streamline the game, but if I'm playing this kind of game, I kind of want the amount of detail it has.
Get the couple of extra scenario sets and you have ton of value. I just wish SPQR was available, right now its on GMT's P500, slowly getting there maybe next year. :) Thanks for looking at this game. If I might suggest, check the counters as you take them off the spurs to make sure there's no peeling from the counter's core. GMT had some problems with early production copies of this particular game and had to send many people a new set of counters to correct the problem.
I'm a good way into counter-clipping and my set appears OK. Nice, thick counters, too.
Unfortunately Tyrant is the one I haven't got, and it seems to be hard/pricy to get. But there's a raft of scenarios at C3i Ops Center... and I have SPQR Deluxe, plus Barbarian, already. So I have enough GBoh content to keep me busy pretty much as long as I like.
The deluxe treatment of this, as well as the new SPQR, makes me wish that GMT would do a deluxe version of Chandragupta too. I vastly prefer the brown core counters and color player aids. But I guess that since there still are new copies of Chandragupta floating around, it must've not sold very well.
Helped me pull the trigger on this item
Most scholars date the battle of Sellasia to 222 BC not 221.
thank you
Liar, you moved the game!
I blame autocorrect.