World in Flames
World in Flames, (WiF) is a strategy level board game simulating the action throught the Second World War. Each player plays one of the major countries involved. USA, USSR, England, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and/or China. In general, up to 6 players can participate, since neither France nor China is really suitable for a player to play alone, so they usually are played by someone playing another country as well.
Playing one of the countries means controlling its production and building the military forces as well as commanding them in battle.
Production is simple in theory, but complicated in practice. Not the technical
aspects of how to build, but knowing what to build and when to build it. This
demands some planning and foresight. For example a battleship or a aircraft
carrier needs two years of playing time to be built, so you better plan ahead
so you have your units when you need them. To further complicate the planning,
your production is limited by something called gearing. You cannot suddenly
start building five battleships in one turn. You have to gear up your
production first, meaning that what you can start building in a gamturn depends
on what you build last turn, so if you need to build lots of infantry
divisions, you had better built a lot of them before so your production is
up and running.
To at all produce, you need factories and resources, which are all
represented on the map, and you increase your production if you can
conquer the areas where they are. You also need oil to keep your
military running, so conquering and holding the oil wells is also an
important aspect of the game.
You command your army/navy/air units on a strategic level. Each unit being roughly an army corps, a single major ship as a battle ship or an aircraft carrier, or a air wing with perhaps 250 planes. You move your units in a series of movement impulses and you fight your opponents units by calculating odds and throwing dice. The maneuvering is very much a question about supply lines and strategically important positions.
The whole world is represented on several maps with hexes on. The major
ones being the european 
and the
asian/pacific maps 
.
Other maps are also available to show both america an africa, but these maps see less action than the main areas of fighting. The european map has a scale of 100km for each hex while the other maps has 230km per hex, except for the american map which has 650km per hex.
There are three major types of units, land, sea and air units.
A land unit represents a force ranging from a division up to a full army,
and all land units have a fight strength and a movement allowance.
A sea unit is a single battleship, a heavy cruiser or a aircraft
carrier. All along with some support ships (4 to 6 destroyers)
Or it can be a transport fleet och a submarine group. All sea units have
a movement allowance and surface combat strength, anti air strength and
shore bombardment factor, as well as a defense factor.
An air unit is approximately 250 planes and can be a fighter, a bomber,
an air transport, or a naval plane unit. Each air unit has a movement
allowance, air-to-air combat strength, tactical bombardment strength,
air-to-sea combat strength, and strategic bombardment strength.
WiF is essentially a game pitching two sides (axis vs allies) against eachother, and as such isn't a game about diplomacy. However, each player has his own agenda and his own victory conditions, so in addition to having to work together to be on the winning team, each player can place himself in a better or worse position when the victory points are calculated, so there is an element of diplomacy involved where player can try to maximise their own vitory points.
Another important part of diplomacy is when the US can enter the war. The later this happens, the better for the axis players.
The game is played in gameturns, each gameturn being two months of time. It (the global campaign) starts in september 1939 with the German declaration of war on Poland, and ends in 1945. Each turn is then divided into phases such as the production phase, and impulses, where the players move on the map. An important aspect of the game is that you can not do all you want to do in a move. You have to make decisions on what is most important to do each time you do something, and this choice will limit you abilities in other areas. For example, if you decide you need to move your fleets a lot, you chose a naval action, but this also means you can not mot your land forces at all.