I started playing the board game in the late 80's. It's a fun way to kill an entire weekend. It's a very loooooooong game, and there are hundreds of pieces to set up on the card-table size map. There have been a couple of other board game spin offs which focus on either Europe, the Pacific, or a specific time frame, but the original is the best. As mentioned above, there are some cool rule variants you can purchase or you can make up your own. We always let German tanks hit on a 4 or less, when they were accompanied by infantry, instead of on a 3 or less like all the others in order to represent the blitz.
When the computer version came out, I jumped right on that band wagon, too. There is another computer version called Axis and Allies: Iron Blitz that adds some neat scenarios and value editing capabilities, but Hasblo never offered a patch for it to correct errors. In fact they shipped IB with bugs that had been fixed with patches for the original A&A.
There are several ladder clubs that play on MSN's game zone, the one I used to be a member of was Spring1942.com . I'm not sure that they still use the same name, but it keeps up with wins and losses and has a status system with ranks.
Great fun, but very time consuming. I never played an online game that lasted less than 6 hours. Most were 12 or more and had to be played over the period of several days.
One final note. Under Windows XP the music doesn't play correctly. Each country had it's own tune that playing during it's turn, but now it skips and repeats, so the only way to play it without going insane is to play it without the music on.
