The ASL Game Assist Program

I recently read some of the old ASL Annuals (published by Avalon Hill in the late 80s and early 90s) when a full-page ad for the ASL Game Assist Program caught my eye.

Nowadays, it is of course fairly common for a game to have a companion app, be it official or fan-made. But it surprised me to see an implementation of this idea so early, and I wanted to take a look-see!

While the app isn't available for download anywhere these days, I got lucky: the original developer, Chris Gammon, replied to a post of mine on BoardGameGeek and was able to send me the IBM PC version of his app a few days later.

Copyright notice

Once started, the app walks you through a short wizard to set up a new game, prompting you for ELR, SAN and battlefield integrity. Once that's over, you're led to an option screen:

Among various special rules, we can toggle a compact view for laptops (which at the time often had somewhat squat screens) or a black-and-white mode. The IIFT is also supported here.

Then, we can enter OBA modules, reinforcements and bombardments before the game eventually starts with the first wind DR.

On top of our DR, we also get a subsequent dr and five random selection rolls, just in case we need them.

And now, we're in the main menu! From here on, the app tracks the current phase and turn, and offering us a variety of relevant actions. Right now, we're in the RPh, so of course we can't do a lot. However, if we wanted to do all our rally rolls in the app, we could!

But when moving to the PFPh, we unlock the more interesting options.

For example, we can resolve IFT rolls, being prompted for firepower, TEM and whether cowering is applicable. The app tells us about ROF, potential breakdowns, and the effect our attack has according to the IFT or IIFT - and it even allows us to randomly select targets if necessary without rolling any dice ourselves.

Same thing for To-Hit rolls! In order to help us calculate the DRMs for this, there are also handy reference cards.

If we hit, we can resolve our To-Kill roll within the app, too:

There's also a wizard for resolving CC, although it seems a bit convoluted to me - which may just be due to how chaotic CC is.

Overall, I think this app is really interesting! It's not necessarily something I would recommend you use in 2026 (although DOSBox emulation makes it very easy to run, and it is very easy to use if you are at all familiar with TUIs), but seeing an ancestor of today's "companion apps" was a nice peek into computing history. I am not entirely convinced using the app makes gameplay significantly faster, by-and-large, but for more involved TH/TK calculations, a modern smartphone app with similar functionality might actually be fairly useful. Then again, I went to my first ASL convention earlier this year and it seems that, for a lot of people, an event like that is an opportunity to get away from computers for a bit.

Thanks to Chris for providing me with the program (and the accompanying manual, too)!