From: Dave Townsend Subject: GMT's 8th Air Force sort-of review (long) GMT's 8TH AIR FORCE arrived last week, and I finally got a chance to give it a good look-over. It's their 2nd module in the DOWN IN FLAMES series that was launched by RISE OF THE LUFTWAFFE. The system is a card game in the UP FRONT/NAVAL WAR vein. It has almost as much variety as the former, without it formidible rulebook -- this is a game you really *could* play with your kids. At the same time, it avoids the trivialization of history that you see in NAVAL WAR, with fleets of mixed nationality battling it out. (There's a review of the system a la ROTL on the grognard sites.) To call 8AF a module is slightly misleading, as it contains more of just about everything than ROTL. It includes rewritten rules (numbered this time), more counters (aces, bomb markers), more aircraft (German, British, American), more campaigns, and more player aids. However, you do still need ROTL to play. There have been some changes to DIF system. The biggest changes are that there's no Wingman phase in the first player turn of the game, dive bombing has been reworked, and there are two new altitudes. Otherwise, the rules have mostly been restructed, improving wording and organization. Changes from ROTL are marked in the basic rules, but strangely enough in the advanced game they are not. New planes making their appearance are B-17, B-24, B-26, P-47s, P-51s, later model Spitfires and Hurricanes, tons of new British bombers, and enough new Germans to make my deck of German planes nearly as large as the action deck. The meat of the new rules involves additions to the system. Aerial rockets, heavy bombers, anti-tank guns, the Norden bombsight, turbochargers, rockets, and jets are now integrated into the system. Most of the changes are pretty simple (heavy bombers fly in groups of 3, not 2 like medium bombers), and the new player aid card summarizes campaign options and bombing procedures. There's not much extra memory load here. How do the jets play? There's a new action card -- Full Throttle -- which are added to the ROTL action deck. (These are the only new action cards in 8AF; all the other cards are aircraft.) Jets get a certain number of Full Throttle chits (which can be used as FT cards) each turn, depending on their thrust. The Me-262 has a thrust of 1, and the Me-163 has a thrust of 2. Since Full Throttle can also be used as a manuever when you are tailed or disadvantaged, it looks like it'll be hard to keep a bead on the jets. But I haven't played with them enough to get a good feel for them. Compared to the medium bombers of ROTL, the heavy bombers are really impressive. A group of 3 undamaged B-17s gets a mini-hand of 6 cards to defend against attacks, and can take an incredible amount of damage -- it's 10 points just to flip them, and later models can take 15 points before they're shot down. Of course, the "Fuel Tank Hit; Aircraft Destroyed" still works just fine against them. When they get over a target, they draw 8 cards to determine damage. This is pretty powerful stuff when you're used to the medium bombers, which draw only one or two cards when they bomb. A welcome addition to the system is Operations, which represent specific raids or campaigns during the war, as opposed to the more abstract campaigns (e.g. Invasion of Poland) where the only relation between one mission and the next is the available resources. Their are four operations: Operation Blue, The Relief of Stalingrad, The Schweinfurt Raids, and Dam Busting. Unfortunately, the operations seem to be the least well tested part of the system. I'm still not sure how Dam Busting is supposed to work (are there three missions, one for each dam, or just one with three targets, or what?). I encountered similar difficulties in understanding procedure on the Stalingrad mission, and the # of B-17s to be used seems to be missing on one of the other two operations. So kudos for the idea but let's hope some more explanation is forthcoming. The campaigns include generic late-war bombing scenarios, some of which use an Operation as one of the possible missions. There are special night campaigns which are solitaire playable, which are better than the solitaire Crete campaign from ROTL but still no substitute for a live opponent. Campaign options have been improved; there is no longer the one-to-one correspondence between missions and options, which is a boon to gameplay since choices are less predictable. If you liked ROTL, I highly recommend 8AF. If you haven't tried the system, ROTL makes a good, cheap introduction, and there's not much "unlearning" to do if you continue on to 8AF -- just more of a good thing. If you pick up C3i issues #3 and #5, you'll have Russian, Polish, French, British, American, German, Italian, and Finnish planes (and associated campaigns), all using a simple system with a tremendous variety of scenarios. In terms of game play versus cost, its certainly been one of my best investments. Anyone with a PBEM system? --DaveT; davet@magnet.com