WW2 Revommendations

My 7 year old son has become obsessed with WW2 (and I mean obsessed). Over the past few months, he has checked out basically any book in the school library on the topic that the librarian will allow. He just watched the Longest Day with his grandpa over Christmas Break.

We got him a bunch of the BMC army guys/sets for Christmas and we are setting up re-enactments with Heroscape terrain and having the battle be determined via nerf guns. He created a version with initiative today by introducing dice to move his landing craft.

Our 9 year old daughter picked out the Bolt Action Band of Brothers starter kit for Christmas (we usually let them choose gifts to each other — within reason — even if they seem a bit advanced; like to give agency in the relationship and all that); this looks reasonable. Is it good?

Other recommendations for any other media (books, movies, games)? The good news is that this has really engaged him on reading…which he was doing fine before, but likely not excelling. Now he is all in on anything. We keep the details of the atrocities unspoken as of now — using broad brushstrokes to paint a picture of the general idea of the conflict without too much that a 7 year old shouldn’t be thinking about.

We got some good graphic novels, and some more books — but I know there are some others here with older kids and also a deeper interest in world war 2 than the average bear (I saw the book Sag mentioned in the other thread and will likely check that out myself)

Thanks — sorry for the rambling post.

Space Ghost wrote: Our 9 year old daughter picked out the Bolt Action Band of Brothers starter kit for Christmas (we usually let them choose gifts to each other — within reason — even if they seem a bit advanced; like to give agency in the relationship and all that); this looks reasonable. Is it good?

The BoB starter set is actually very good, if you are OK with minis assembly. You get around 24 American paratroopers, 12 German grenadiers with a SdKfz German half-track vehicle, a ruined farmhouse for some beginner terrain, a chunky A5-sized full paperback rulebook, the Bolt Action dice (in 2 different colors, also useful for Warlord's scifi and fantasy versions), some translucent red pin markers, and a few regular d6. Should still be a decent price at Amazon (around $85 if I remember.)

The kids love YouTube, and there is a fantastic (and impressively granular, for this day & age) series on there called WW2, by Time Ghost and Indy Neidell (Indy is an American ex-pat living in Sweden.) The main series are weekly videos & go week-by-week in real time along with the war conveying what happened during that week. They started doing weekly shows about 3 years ago (beginning with December 1939) and are up to Xmas 1942 now (so yeah, VERRRY granular!) The channel also does ongoing special series & episodes on things like vehicles, homefront relationships, spies, biographies, and the series you will want to skip with kids called War Against Humanity, where they delve into all sorts of genocide, killing, The Final Solution, executions, and the real horrors of war. That one's a downer, and routinely gets censored by YT, but they don't flinch from telling the whole truth about the horrors of real war, which is commendable, because it ain't all triumph on D-Day.

Obviously there are also decades of books out there, much of which is about whatever topic/author strikes your fancy.

As far as games go, Memoir 44 is an easily accessible one and one where you can play through multiple battles in one night.

There is a new game coming from a KS campaign called 303 Squadron representing the Polish fighter squadron during the Battle of Britain.

Wild Blue Yonder is a pretty good card game representing dogfighting in both the European and Pacific theatres.

Blood Red Skies for fighter combat if you want an X-Wing sort of experience. There is a person on Patreon putting out MANY stl files of planes, but I have resisted so far.

You can get a very good 2p board game cheap called Duel in the Dark surrounding Britain's night bombing campaign against Germany.

B-17 Leader or the venerable B-17: Queen of the Skies for solo gaming.

Cheers

If you want to go naval Cruel Seas is on clearance a lot of places.

I like the Down in Flames series for card plane combat.

Wings of Glory would be good at that age.

I'm not much of a comic guy, but Sgt. Rock is fantastic.

Have a look at Table Air Combat on Wargame Vault. It's a super cheap print n play that is super easy to assemble. $2 can get you dogfighting Spitfires and 109s and the movement is super cool. You purchase by airplane type, not airplane count, so $10 can put a 40 plane Battle of Britain scenario on your table if you're crazy enough to do it. Fully accessible to kids this age. In fact let him teach you.

Hush Kit for general airplane goodness on the web.

Memoir is fully accessible at this age, the starter box is sufficient. My boys loved it at this age and needed no help playing.

Wings of Glory, of course, but it's pricey. Gorgeous though. I'm thinking of building monster Table Air Combat templates and using them to fly WofG planes.

Another vote for Memoir'44 at that age, pretty sure I was introducing it to my lad then.

Don't be a modern pandering helicopter parent.....

Advanced Squad Leader OR NOTHING!!!!!

The child is old enough for Phoenix Command for sure. LOL

Case Blue.

But, really, M'44 sounds optimal here to me as well.