Average Dave

Tonight I talked Vicki into a game of Wings of War. I’d recently picked up 4 miniatures and two sets of the game (’Fighter Aces’ and ‘Watch Your Back!’) so we gave it a try.

We faced off with me as the Germans, with a Fokker (Fritz) and an Albatross (Ernst) vs her Allied fighters in a Sopwith Camel (Jan Oli) and the Spad XIII (Ricken). The kitchen table was the setting and we fought like novice fighters thrown into the mix for the first time. Manuever cards were mixed, cards laid for the wrong planes were planned for, most turns we wondered what our actual pilots were doing as we followed our carefully thought out moves in amazement as to exactly what we were thinking, seconds ago.

In that respect the game feels a bit like RoboRally, play out your moves in secret and watch how they turn out - but obviously there’s no-one you can even blame for why your plan goes horribly wrong. At the end of the day, the game is pretty luck driven. Our planes headed towards each other in close proximity and we had to take two damage cards each. I drew a flame and a 5 pointer, Vicki drew a 0 and another 0. On the next turn my plane exploded thanks to the explosion card that we drew. The rules do mention taking it out, but to be fair to Vicki I said we’d keep it in to try to ensure a short game.

So, I lost (we decided to play to the first death), but it was a fun game. I look forward to playing it again (next week at our first games weekend for over a year) and also with some mission based scenarios (bomb this, escort that, etc)

What would be really cool is some time lapsed photography of a game session going on. I think you’d really get an idea for the swirling nature of the battle. I’d like to try to do something like this one day.

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