I had a buddy in grad school who had all these board based war games refighting old battles, mostly WW 2. We'd stay up all night doing one of them. Then they went to computers and I would play against a computer and basically win every time, the computer algorithms back then were rudimentary.
I have one somewhere for the PTO and you can play either side. If you take the US, you basically end up just bludgeoning the poor Japanese with massive stuff coming on line late in 1943. Which is, well, duh. If you play the Japanese side, you quickly start having major issues with training because it requires gasoline which requires oil. So, you have to develop oil resources quickly, and basically, you can't. It's an unholy mess. But I did learn a lot of geography.