When asked, I tell people that Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) is my favorite game of all time. In brief, it’s a highly-detailed game about tactical level combat in World War 2 and Korea. The counters represent squads of soldiers plus leaders, heroes, heavy weapons, guns, and individual tanks and vehicles. Each game turn represents about two minutes of combat.

To give you some context, the rules come in a three-ring binder and the core content you need to master to play the game runs to about 160 pages.

For more information about the game, see here.

What I like about ASL:

• Immersive game play. No other game comes close.
• Components. The maps and counters are excellent.
• Variety of theaters. You can fight actions from every WW2 theater.
• Variety of encounters. You can fight with just infantry or have guns, tanks, artillery, attack aircraft, gliders, and landing boats. (Not in the same scenario…I think.)
• Variety of conditions. You can fight in day, night, summer, winter, good weather, or bad weather.
• Variety of scenarios. I will never run out of scenarios to play. There must be over a thousand, and the majority have high replayability.
• Each scenario is a challenge. You cannot just push around the pieces and see what happens. Or rather, you can, but you’ll lose. You have to have a plan, it has to be a good one, and you have to know how to tweak it in the face of enemy action.
• Swings and roundabouts. Fate plays a part and you have to be able to take the highs and the lows. For example, in one turn, your sniper might eliminate the top enemy leader. In the next, your tank’s main gun may malfunction just as an enemy tank appears in its sights.
• It’s tactical level combat. I love games at this level. I’m addicted to them.

What I dislike about ASL:

• I’m not very good at it.
• It doesn’t represent command and control very well.
• There are too many gamey tactics that have no relation to real-life combat.

Despite these dislikes, ASL is still my favorite.

For many ASL gamers, it’s the only game they play. Given the commitment to be any good at ASL, this is understandable. I could probably improve my gameplay if I restricted my gaming time to only ASL, but I’m not prepared to give up the other games that I enjoy playing.

Finally, the rulebook. It’s a monster. It’s hard to read. It’s so tough to learn the game via the rulebook, the publishers put out Starter Kit versions with cut-down rules. That having been said, the rulebook is an amazing piece of technical writing. It operates very well as a reference meaning that, generally, you can find the answer to your query quickly.