Advanced Squad Leader System Comparison

Sitrep

There are three ways into this game, and people discuss them fairly regularly. Original Squad Leader, out of print since the Reagan administration and living on the used market. ASL Starter Kit, ~$30 to “start,” four boxes, done. And full ASL, the one with the rulebook that scares people.

What follows is a straight comparison across the things that actually decide which one you pick: what it costs, how hard it is to learn, how many pages you really have to read, how much game there is, and whether you can find a human being to play it with.

Same Engine

Before any of the differences, the thing that ties all three together. They’re the same game engine. A hex is 40 meters across in all three. A squad is about 8-12 men in all three. All three give you individual weapons, guns, vehicles, leaders, and heroes.

Superimposed over the mapboard is a hexagonal grid used to measure movement/range to an abstracted scale of 40 meters per hex.

A2.1 BOARD CONFIGURATION

That’s why this comparison is worth making at all. You’re not choosing between three different games about World War II. You’re choosing how you want to enter the system.

Cost To Get In

Squad Leader is the odd one out here, because it doesn’t have a set price. It’s driven by the used market and the condition a used copy is in. A beaten-up copy goes cheap while a pristine, unpunched one can go for numbers that make you close the browser tab. You’re at the mercy of whoever’s selling.

The other two have real price tags. Starter Kit #1 is about thirty dollars, maybe twenty-five used, and that thirty dollars buys you a complete infantry game you can play right out of the box, no dependencies. Full ASL wants the rulebook, the charts, and at minimum Beyond Valor, which lands around $220 depending on how much of it you buy new.

The long game is where it really differs. You can own every Starter Kit product in print for something like $300 and be done. ASL has no finish line. Stick to the in-print core modules, and you might keep it under $3000. Modules run $150, and the big ones run $200, and there’s always another one in the pipeline.

How Hard Is It To Learn?

Here’s where the reputations might not match the reality.

Squad Leader starts easy. The original box is genuinely straightforward, and the programmed instruction walks you through one scenario at a time. Brilliant! The trouble comes later. Cross of Iron, Crescendo of Doom, and G.I.: Anvil of Victory each pile more rules on top, and they supersede, contradict, and rewrite what came before. By the time you’ve got all four modules, you’re holding four rulebooks that conflict with one another, and there’s no good way to look anything up.

Starter Kit is medium complexity and stays there. The catch is the writing. It’s wordier than Squad Leader without being clearer; some of it reads ambiguously, and there’s no official index (though a player-made index exists for download). Section numbering if far too coarse to be lookup useful. When you need a rule, you flip and hope and have to dig through long paragraphs of rules to find that one line you’re looking for.

Full ASL is high complexity, and it goes higher the further you push it. But the rulebook is the best-organized document in the hobby. Almost obsessivly organized. And it needs to be. Everything is numbered, everything cross-references everything else, and if you use the PDF version, every one of those references is a live hyperlink. Somebody tells you to check B2.5 and you click B2.5. That structure is the reason full ASL is easier to look things up in than either of the other two, even though it’s harder to play.

The Page Count Conspiracy

This is the number that should change the conversation, so here it is on its own.

Core rules means the rules you need to play: infantry, guns, the To Hit process, vehicles, and the terrain in front of you. Not night. Not airborne drops. Not blizzards, or beach landings under star shells.

Squad Leader‘s whole system is about 144 pages, roughly 40 per module across the four boxes, and none of it is optional. Starter Kit is about 40 pages total! 12 for infantry, 9 for guns, 9 for vehicles, 9 for the Pacific. Full ASL‘s core is about 160 pages. Chapter A is 62, Chapter B is 46, Chapter C is 26, Chapter D is 27.

One hundred sixty (ASL) against one hundred forty-four (SL). Keep in mind this is just an estimate and doesn’t take into account word density. But the game many in the hobby call unplayable has a core about the size of the game everybody calls the friendly one, and it’s better written and organized. Almost everything else in that terrifying binder is optional, even parts of the core like some of Chapter B (terrain). Never fight in the desert, and you never read the desert rules. PTO rules are optional. Chapter H is 200-odd pages of vehicle and ordnance notes, and few have ever read it front to back. You look up those two tanks in your scenario, read two short paragraphs, and you’re done.

Small Bite

Squad Leader‘s programmed instruction is the thing it’s famous for, and it deserves that reputation. Seven pages of rules get you through the first scenario. Each scenario after that adds a little more. The downside is that you can’t skip. Jump ten scenarios ahead, and you’re playing with rules that were taught in the nine you skipped, so you go back and read them anyway. The point was to learn the new, complex tactical system slowly.

Starter Kit does the same trick at module level. SK1 teaches infantry, SK2 adds guns, SK3 adds vehicles, SK4 adds the Pacific theater (and rumor has it that SK5 is going to add the North African theater). It’s still programmed instruction, but with much larger chunks. MMP also puts the Starter Kit rulebook up for free, so you can read the whole thing before you spend a dime.

Full ASL has no official programmed instruction, but that doesn’t mean nobody built one. There’s an article in The General Vol. 30.1 that breaks ASL into lessons: read these sections, skip everything else, play this scenario, then come back for the next set. It walks you up through Chapter A and B, brings in Chapter C and some guns, then Chapter D and vehicles, adding terrain and infantry rules as it goes. If you’re starting in full ASL, that’s the way to do it. Check out Jim Stahler’s ASL programmed instruction method in the ASL play aid area of the site.

Never drink from the fire hose.

The Rabbit Hole

All three have somewhere to go after the opening purchase. They just go down deeper holes.

Squad Leader‘s road ends at four boxes, and a pile of fan rewrites. Two of those rewrites, going by the names Squad Leader Redux and Squad Leader Classic I, clean up the original rules and run about 200 pages each. Which raises an awkward question: if you’re going to read 200 pages of somebody’s reorganized Squad Leader, why not read 160 pages of ASL, which is already organized and has forty years of support behind it?

Starter Kit goes further than people expect. Expansion packs, bonus packs, a historical campaign game in Decision at Elst, and another coming in Prelude to War (Marco Polo Bridge incident). Full ASL goes until you run out of money.

Size Comparison

Squad Leader has around a hundred official scenarios. Starter Kit has about 150 across the core modules, bonus packs, expansion packs and Elst. Full ASL has somewhere between one and two thousand official scenarios. Including all third-party creations, full ASL could have upwards of 8000 scenarios, but I’ve never counted. There’s A LOT!

Historical campaign games are a huge gap. Squad Leader has none officially. Starter Kit has one in print with a second on the way. Full ASL has roughly a hundred, about twenty of them from MMP and the rest from third parties. These are the ones where the map is the actual ground instead of geomorphic boards abstractly standing in for it.

Order of battle follows the same curve. Starter Kit sticks to the major combatants with a thin selection of ordnance and vehicles, which quietly caps how big a fight you can stage. Squad Leader‘s full four-module set is fuller than that but small next to ASL. Full ASL is exhaustive in a way that’s hard to state. Nearly every unit, gun, weapon, and vehicle of the war, with tens of thousands of counters, and if that’s somehow not enough, there are at least six third-party publishers shipping one or more products a year … including additional counters.

Is It Played?

None of the above matters if you can’t find an opponent (assuming you don’t play solo), so here are some real numbers. Over one 30-day window on Vassal, original Squad Leader (the VSQL module) logged 80 sessions. ASL and Starter Kit (the VASL module) logged a combined 5,700 game sessions between them. There’s no way to separate the counts, which is itself the point: as far as VASL is concerned, they’re one game.

That shared module is the other reason Starter Kit is such a good on-ramp. The components are identical to ASL. Not similar, identical. A full ASL player can sit down to a Starter Kit scenario and start playing (remembering not to use heat of battle, bypass, and snipers). A Starter Kit player who upgrades throws nothing away, unless they choose to sell their modules.

It goes the other direction too, with a caveat. You can play an ASL scenario in Starter Kit if you strip out the rules Starter Kit doesn’t have, but excluding some of those rules may imbalance the scenario … maybe not. Converting an ASL scenario down to original Squad Leader isn’t worth attempting.

So yes, ASL, in all its forms, is alive and well today. Easily the most popular hex-and-counter tactical system still being played, 45+ years since release.

Which Rabbit Hole?

If you’ve never played any of it, start with Starter Kit #1. Thirty dollars, forty pages, and the counters are the ones you’ll keep using for the next twenty years. Nothing about that purchase is wasted even if you go all the way to full ASL down the road.

If you already know you want the whole thing, buy the rulebook and Beyond Valor, then learn it in eight lessons instead of one sitting. The core is 160 pages when you eventually get the whole core system under your belt.

And Squad Leader? Play it because you love it. Play it for nostalgia. Play it because you had it in 1979, or because the programmed instruction is a genuinely brilliant piece of design that the hobby learned from. Don’t play it because you think it’s the easy version (unless you just stay in the first Squad Leader). Four modules deep, it probably isn’t easier than ASL; it’s just messier, and there are few opponents to be found, either face-to-face or on Vassal Engine.

Debriefing

Strip away the debate and the three systems line up in a way that’s fairly. The scale never changes, the squad never changes, the leaders and heroes never change. What changes is how much of the machine is switched on and how well the manual is written. Squad Leader turns it on slowly and then loses track of itself due to its popularity back in the day. Starter Kit turns on slim and trim, which is exactly what a first game should do. Full ASL turns on everything and hands you an index so you can find the parts you actually need. It also hands you a large player base of experienced people to learn from.

The page count is the interesting part. A hundred and sixty pages of core rules isn’t an unreasonable ask. I’ve seen many games with similar core rulesets. Using Jim Stahler’s learning method, it’s a series of short reads with a scenario in between each one, and people have been climbing it one lesson at a time since The General printed the instructions for it.

GET TO THE CHOPPA…!!!

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