Above the Trenches
Design Essays

Why a Strategic-Level World War I Air Game?

Although I'd played Richthofen's War plenty as a kid, my interest in World War I aviation was not particularly high. In fact, the initial glimmerings of AtT were spurred by, of all things, a strategic-level World War II (no typo!) air game, Bombs Away!, published in GameFix magazine a number of years ago. It was quick to play and showed a high-level view of what the Allied bombing campaign against Germany was like. There were no hexes, just nine deployment areas (three political, three economic, and three military) where each side placed cards loosely representing their forces.

It somehow came to me that the World War I western front might make an interesting setting for a system based on Bombs Away!. I took a quick trip to the bookstore and began studying the history to see if there was an actual game in the topic or not.

Though Richthofen's War had got me reading about the WWI aces long ago, I had never paid too much attention to the bigger picture. Now, investigating more high-level material, my interest in the topic became very keen. There were indeed a number of gameable elements:

1. Technnology: War acts as a technological accelerator, and WWI was no exception. But the technological change wasn't uniform; both sides had periods of superiority and inferiority, which is nice when thinking about play balance. I want to make the technology race the spine of the story that AtT tells. The resulting uncertainty nicely recreates the mindset of the historical participants. Will the Germans deploy their next-generation fighter before ours makes it to the front?

   And zeppelins are always fun.

2. Quantity vs. quality: No one ever had enough aeroplanes at the front. In periods where the enemy had technical superiority, a difficult (meaning "interesting to gamers") decision had to be made: keep the production lines moving, or interrupt them so as to allow production of new, hopefully better types?

   There are also interesting tradeoffs regarding pilot training. Mediocre pilots now, or better ones later?

3. Mission Variety: Bombs Away! and Luftwaffe are WW2 air games where bombing is the main point, with the fighters along for protection. To be sure, bombing was important in WWI as well -- both sides tried strategic bombing as a way of lowering morale on the enemy home front -- but the more or less static western front made artillery observation and photo reconnaissance the primary mission of the air forces. So there are more tasks to that your forces must accomplish, and figuring out proper force allocations should be an interesting task.

   Fighters are still present, of course, to prevent those activities. But (tying back to the previous point) how should you be dividing production among bombers, recce craft, and fighters to complete your goals?

4. No obvious historical blunders: So many historical games are crippled by the real-life blunders made by one side or the other. Games about Midway almost never play like the real battle, because the Japanese player knows he's facing U.S. carriers and not just the island.

   But the nascent air forces of WWI seem to have followed reasonable strategies that mean minimal player hamstringing is needed.

5. Novelty: I don't know of anything too close to what I have in mind. Maybe Sid Meier's Civilization?

On the other hand, if you're the first person to think of something, there may be a reason why....