Wings of War

Some pics from the Wings Of War game the Doc and I played yesterday.

We faced off with two Spitfires versus two Messerschmitts: the terrain was set up more for visual interest than with any view to an effect on the game, so we tried to recreate an archetypal English countryside look.

The game is turn based but simultaneous movement, with maneuvers plotted two turns in advance, which meant that predicting where your target would be in 2 turns is really the key skill.

After bringing guns to bear on an enemy, the amount of damage needed to shoot it down is also quite high. In general, I found the use of counters for allocating damage and marking speeds to be a bit fiddly.

The combination of free form movement (i.e. rather than a hex map) with precise firing arcs meant that, for a serious competition, there would very likely be disputes over whether or not a plane had been nudged off position. A plain flat map, devoid of anything but painted on terrain, would probably help the playing field more level, so to speak, but also much less visually interesting.

After a few hours of maneuvering around, we ended up doing Immelmann turns all the time to stay within the playing area.

The game ended with a plane shot down for each of us, and me forfeiting the game when an Immelmann turn brought my last plane outside the playing area.

All in all, a reasonably fun game, but we both agreed that had there been more players and more planes, the turn sequence would have slowed down tremendously.