For me at least, it’s not about recency - WW2 was 80-ish years ago. I just don’t find reality-based war themes exciting.
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No.
I will not say that it is impossible some lesson/learning could be gleaned from games with such a theme. Or that nobody should be playing games in which one side plays the Nazis. I am sure Undaunted and Memoir 44 are good games. I am picking these 2 in particular because they seem to have made it out of the typical war-game corner and are according to BGG the most popular WWII themed games.
But they are still not for me. If I want a game that deals with tough historical themes, I would at the moment pick Weimar. This is set in the period just before the Nazis came to power and as far as I am aware is about preventing their rise. I have it here, have not been able to find the time to learn the rules.
I’ll pick up Undaunted Callisto but it might just be that it still isn’t a game for me despite a change in themes. I am very curious about it. And because I know the original theme there will still be plenty to think about when playing.
I have at times considered Black Orchestra because it is a cooperative game and you play the members of a group that tried to assassinate Hitler. But a couple of weeks ago I talked to my cousin who teaches history at highschool and he mentioned how these people weren’t exactly the good guys. They were trying to remove Hitler because they thought he was running the war badly… so that’s a another pass then for me.
I have thought about Paolo Mori’s Blitzkrieg plenty of times. But I think I’d rather go with the Cesar version if at all. I have played the critters version of Land, Air and Sea… and it’s fine enough. The theme is pretty thin on that one. It could be a generic war theme … I still avoided it until I got the animal themed one only to find out that I am going to give it away again.
The next one up on the list is already Maquis which I have played. It’s a good enough solo game which I found a bit too hard to parse on the app. And since I have a feeling that solo-only games are not my thing for the most part, I never bought a copy. But that was not on account of the theme.
Overall, outside of the hardcore-wargame corner WWII is not that popular a theme. If it wasn’t for Memoir 44 and Undaunted, I would have said it is almost non-existent outside of the niche. There are a lot more Cthulhu or colonial themed games which until way too recently were published here with almost no historical considerations attached because theme was just a bit of set dressing with little brown cubes on plantations 
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After all this time, this forum continues to surprise me.
I didn’t expect the near-universal lack of interest in Mindclash or Luciani/Tascini. I also thought there was widespread interest in Arkham styled stuff in general, but these posts suggest it’s pretty narrow. More recently, I (along with @MarkSP and @EnterTheWyvern) created the impression, alone, that the forum was all up ons La Granja. Mostly me. I was all up ons.
A good reminder about how a salient minority can skew perceptions - in this case pretty clandestine and just an interesting twist among friends. A bit more sinister when seeping through the cracks of social media, politics, or the news.
La Granja is the real deal, tho.
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Having only played a few of these I have decided they are not for me. Top marks for theming in Trekerion though until you get to the tricks where you err… put cards next to each other to make a better trick?. Voidfall was a dud for me, looks great though!
They’re generally at the rules heavy end of Euro-styling which is not what I like.
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Yeah, several of the conspirators you can play in Black Orchestra were committed Nazis who just thought Hitler was a bad leader who was hurting the cause (and honestly, he was). They do go outside the core historical would be assassins to more ancillary counter-Hitler figures, some of whom are more sympathetic, but I think those might be addon characters.
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Which would be fine except that the game [eta: at least the edition I owned for a while] doesn’t mention it, it just says “these great guys tried to stop Hitler”. Which is technically true, but.
(There came a point about 1942-1943 where the British special operations types stopped planning to assassinate Hitler because anyone who replaced him would do a better job of running the war.)
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I think the current edition does say that actually.
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The theme of many alternate histories!
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I think some things might be phases… I have a feeling that at some point quite a few people here must have tried Anachrony at least. I have Voidfall but it is too much of a commitment to spend time with right now.
In a small community two or three voices can seem like a lot, especially when you have to actively solicit the „neutral“ opinions. Positive and negative will probably be voiced. But neutral often seems to add little to a discussion so unless asked for I‘ll rarely say „just not interested“ —most likely to happen on the „has anyone played xyz“ thread which I made explicitly to solicit ALL kinds of opinions, especially the „meh I don‘t really care“ ones to get a broader picture. For La Granja I am on the „might be interested if someone brought it to a table near me but my self-teach solo on BGA seemed a little chaotic and failed to give me a sense of something I wanted to experience again“ not the kind of thing I would normally post about.
As for Arkham… there was a phase where it was definitely the HOT theme for everything and I get a sense on here a few people are just burned out on the theme these days. It may not have always been so but I am one of those people. I used to play Arkham Horror. I had Elder Sign. But then came an inflation of games with the theme… Cthulhu Pandemic? And it wasn‘t any good either. And still… I bet if we made a poll for how many collections had one or more Lovecraftian horror games there would be a lot still there…
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I have Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness (both editions but I tossed the first edition stuff that didn’t work in 2nd when I moved) and Arkham Horror LCG. I would still happily play either 2nd or 3rd edition Arkham Horror as well, though I would have to pass up Elder Sign or Unfathomable as the former is IMO flavorless gruel with a death spiral and the latter, well, I never liked the BSG boardgame.
And FWIW, I have nearly every Mindclash game.
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Right after JR in Rambo 3. Mind you, he was helping the Taliban there against the soviets.
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