From: "Walt O'Hara" Subject: B-17: A moldy oldy, but i dig it I found a copy of B-17: Queen of the Skies used recently, and I picked it up because it looked playable and was a solitaire design. Boy, am I pleased with this 5 dollar expenditure. Similar to LONDON'S BURNING and RAF, the player is playing against the system. The player gets a profile card of a B-17 that tracks the damage to aircraft systems, weapons, and crews. There is a mission player's sheet that tracks all the events that happen during the flight. In addition to that, you maintain a flight roster (in the campaign game) that tracks the performance of the plane you are flying over 25 missions. You also track your crews that way. The heart of the game is the "AI" which is a series of multicolored charts. The rulebook elegantly makes use of the chart colors in a handy notation-- if the rulebook says "roll 1d6 on P5" that means to check the 5th chart on the Pink Card. There is a strategic display that is basically a map with zones marked on it. The little B-17 marker moves through the zones while you check for fighter encounters and random events. Variables like weather and fighter cover (which is good through only the nearer zones-- no drop tanks in the time period simulated here) effect how many planes "jump" you from zone to zone. The number and type of fighters you encounter (or if you encounter them at all) is governed by random tables. Air combat is very, very simple but can be quite an anxious moment. How many guns can come to bear is governed by what angle the plane is attacking from (again, an elegant system of fighter cards and a mounted B-17 mapboard is used to set up the tactics of air attack). Fighters usually have one shot at hurting the B-17, while the B-17 may have up to 4 or 5 chances to shoot back. There are also special rules fo continuation of attack and the special tailgunner tactic of letting the fighter pass the B-17 before shooting at it. Once you get over a target, things get very hairy indeed. First you roll weather to see if your chances of hitting the target are affected. Next you roll for flak, which can shoot the hell out of your plane quicker than any fighter. Then you roll for fighter attacks. THEN you drop bombs. Damage to target is expressed as a percentage, and this figures into victory conditions. After you drop your bombs, you have to fly back to England, checking for fighter contacts the entire way. If you have suffered so much damage that you drop out of formation, you loiter over zones for two turns instead of one, rolling for more fighters every time. In my first campaign game, completed over the weekend, I went through three planes before my ace B-17 team got invalided home; of the original crew, only "Wings" Nolan (the Pilot), "Sparks" Dugan (radioman), "Monk" Wrench (the inflight engineer, Ned Wright (Right Waist Gunner) and Bomba Weigh (the Bombadier) survived without being replaced. B-17 is enjoyable, easy to pick up and possesses some legant game mechanics. You can probably find this game used for about 10 dollars or less (probably a lot less). If you are on the road a lot, this would make a great game to pack in your suitcase. Walt PS: Be sure to check to see that ALL components are present and accounted for. Every chart is used. There are 16 plane cards, 1 plane silhouette card, several counters, a mounted tactical display, an unomounted cardstock strategic display, and about five colored charts. _____________________________________________________________________ Sent by RocketMail. Get your free e-mail at http://www.rocketmail.com From: "David S. Bieksza" Subject: Re: B-17: A moldy oldy, but I dig it too On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Walt O'Hara wrote: > I found a copy of B-17: Queen of the Skies used recently, and I picked > it up because it looked playable and was a solitaire design. Boy, am > I pleased with this 5 dollar expenditure. For such an enjoyable game _B-17_ sure seems to attract negative comments. Most criticism is directed at two features: the player has few decisions to make (mostly how to allocate MG fire), and the bulk of the action is governed by rolling barrels of dice. These have never bothered me, because historically the crew did have few decisions to make and was subject to lots of factors over which they had no control. I find two aspects of the game especially appealing -- a single mission can, depending on circumstances, be completed in as little as 15 minutes, and stringing missions into a 25-mission campaign adds to that "paper time machine" feeling. Note how Walt was able to complete an entire campaign in just one weekend. Another characteristic is that _B-17_ is the damndest anti-war wargame I ever encountered. The player is encouraged to name his crewmen, and they take on such a life of their own that I, for one, don't get hyper over what percentage of bombs I drop on target or how many interceptors I knock down -- I mostly want to get my guys through their tour in one piece and safely returned home. As an example (which was posted some time ago to the Virtual Wargamer HQ), on a long mission to bomb U-boat pens flak scored a critical hit on my plane and essentially blew the nose off. I had to drop out of formation and limp back to England fighting off wave after wave of interceptors unaided. Amazingly the plane reached home, but by that time only a handful of crewmen were still fit. Most were either dead or incapacitated ... including the pilot, copilot, and engineer -- the radio operator was flying the plane! The game-oriented thing to do at this point would be for everybody still fit to bail out and let the plane crash with the incapacitated men ... but I couldn't bring myself to abandon them! All but the radio operator jumped, and he tried for the 1-out-of-36 chance of a successful landing. He failed, killing all aboard, but I felt better for trying. Oddly enough, all the die rolling is not necessarily bad because it provides an element of suspense. I know I always hold my breath when checking a bomb bay hit to see if the bombs detonate in mid-air. Thus this is a poor candidate for a computer assist. Where's the suspense when you press a key and a millisecond later your Pentium Pro tells you the plane got to Zone 5 with such-and-such a laundry list of damage before going down with a fuel tank hit. Finally, I should point out that _B-17_ exaggerates the action for the sake of more interesting game play. Statistics from literally thousands of games have been published in THE AH GENERAL, and the chance of a given plane or crewman completing the 25-mission campaign are minimal. ------- Dave Bieksza bieksza@aplcomm.jhuapl.edu ------- "Comet Hale-Bopp" is an anagram for "HTML be poop, Ace." -------