Almanac of Games for July 20th: Edmund Hillary Kills Hitler With Ice Cream

(Almanac of Games is a weekly feature, published every Sunday)
 

HISTORY:
On July 20th 1944, Adolf Hitler is wounded in an assassination attempt fronted by a Tom Cruise lookalike.

For a long time there was just one attempt at duplicating this event for tabletop, SPI’s 1976 release, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler. But toward the end of 2014, Philip duBarry (Revolution!) will release, through Game Salute, Hitler Must Die.

philip dubarry
With no photos of the game box to be found, here’s one of the designer

No, it’s not an adaptation of Dr. Who’s “Let’s Kill Hitler,” but a co-op game where “you must collaborate with your fellow-traitors to gather supplies and manipulate events [so] that an opportunity to achieve your plan is found.”

On one hand, the “game ends with the roll of a handful of dice!” [Yeah, the exclamation point is the publisher’s.] On the other hand, it has a Twilight Struggle-style series of historical Event Cards. So, it’ll be possible to kill Hitler early in the war and save millions of lives. Word has it that this will be released at Essen 2014. My curiosity is piqued…

Oh, one other thing: on July 20th, 1969, man first walked on the Moon. But if you go by Universal/Greenwich time, it happened on July 21st. So, I’m going to ignore that one….

BIRTHDAY:
On July 20th, 1919, Edmund Hillary was born.assault on everest 1

K2 is my favorite mountain climbing game – and it’s a great one – but Assault on Mt. Everest, from 1976, actually simulates Tenzing Norgay’s 1953 expedition, on which Hillary tagged along….

assault on everest 2The game is a historically accurate recreation of two competing expeditions (British & Swiss) with chits representing specific members of each team (yes, there are chits for Hillary, Tenzing, et al) and a scoresheet detailing the amount of provisions and the health status of each member.

If you’re keen to try it out, the online gaming platform Vassal has a module for this game.

[Photo 1 by Ron Pfeiffer (from Board Game Geek)]
[Photo 2 by Jared (aka Twinge on Board Game Geek)]

OBSERVANCE:

July 20th, 2014, is National Ice Cream Day, aka Sundae Sunday (Third Sunday of July)

Yeah, this is a real thing… Presidential Proclamation and everything. Ronald Reagan, in 1984, proclaimed July to be Ice Cream Month, and the 3rd Sunday in July to be Ice Cream Day. And I though his favorite snack was jellybeans…Ice Cream Combo

The perfect game for today is Ice Cream Combo, another brand-new game, released in June 2014 by Taiwanese game-maker Poki Design. It’s a real-time set collection card game that requires speed and accuracy.

If anybody’s heading to Taiwan this year, pick up a copy for us, okay?

[Photo by Poki Chen (from Board Game Geek)]

Did we miss anything special observances or birthdays for today? Let us know in the Comments!

  • Drew is a contributor to the Board Gamers Anonymous podcast. He's a curator by nature, compulsively reading and obsessively organizing what he's read. He's also been a gamer since the age of 3, which means he's been playing board games for... let's just say more than 40 years, and leave it at that...

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