Squad Leader

Squad Leader is a tactical-level board wargame designed by John Hill and published by Avalon Hill in 1977, simulating small-unit infantry combat in Europe during the Second World War at a scale of roughly forty meters per hexagon. Two players command individual squads, leaders and support weapons across a hexagonal map, resolving fire combat, morale checks and movement through printed combat tables and a counter system that tracked each unit's fire strength, movement allowance and morale independently of its physical size. The base game was followed by three numbered expansions, Cross of Iron, Crescendo of Doom and Crescendo of Doom's companion GI: Anvil of Victory, whose accumulated additions eventually spread the rules across four increasingly complex and sometimes contradictory rulebooks. This complexity led Avalon Hill to publish Advanced Squad Leader beginning in 1985, a rebuilt system intended to simplify, cut and rewrite the rules; Advanced Squad Leader effectively replaced the original Squad Leader system for serious play, rendering most of its counters obsolete even though the original game's mapboards remained necessary for some Advanced Squad Leader scenarios. Avalon Hill kept the original Squad Leader in print afterward as an introductory stepping stone toward the more demanding later system.