Before you plunk down your $60 ($89 if you want it right now direct from GMT, as it has not reached MM yet) plus shipping, be aware that it is very much not a “traditional wargame.” It has cards, lots of “draw an effect from the cup,” and even some wooden blocks (although I’m not sure why they couldn’t have been large counters instead - cost?). But what it clearly is, is “purpose-built.”
What I love about the game is that someone actually designed it. They didn’t take a bunch of historical data, organize it in charts, and have you die-roll your way through your own adventure. They realized that to make a good solitaire game about the bombing campaign, you had to make the player the one who had the most decisions to make. And that’s the Germans. Yeah, the Americans had to plan their raids. But once that’s done, the rest plays itself. And single bombers had few real decisions to make. However, the Germans had both the macro problem of raid identification and interception, and the micro problem of tactically breaking down the bomber formations. The designers here go for the micro.
Once they have that decision nailed down, they decide to focus on how the US “combat box” evolved along with B-17 armament to give the bombers more protection. So that became the map you progress through, like the one to Mordor. And then they devised a neat tactical system that really flows like you’d expect a series of slashing attacks on a bomber formation would go. And the system is slick enough to play quite fast.
My biggest concerns are two: (1) the lack of geographic specificity might make repeated missions kinda samey eventually, even with the changing maps, and (2) the brutality of the loss rate, which rightly shows how dangerous these missions were for an eroding Luftwaffe. Unlike in an RPG, your ability to deal with threats goes down as you progress through a campaign, not up.
But this game shows a couple of designers thinking through a problem and solving it creatively, with a satisfying result. That counts for a lot.
And the rules, which initially seemed a little scattered, are actually complete and without any obvious holes so far. No question that couldn’t be conclusively answered in 30 seconds or less. That counts for something, too.
