Above the Trenches: Introduction

A very long time ago, I was trying to design a game about aviation in the First World War. There are (and were) already a huge number of dogfighting games, and even a few operational games on the topic, so it’s a fair question to ask what else is there to say about the topic.

Well, in reading about the period you are constantly informed that the importance of the air forces came from aerial observation and artillery coordination. So while those dogfighting games are a lot of fun – and I’ve certainly enjoyed them over the years – if that’s all you play, then you get a skewed impression of what the first air war was all about.

Might it not be interesting to see the bigger picture?

By stepping up to the strategic level, the players might decide composition and allocation of squadrons to support ground offensives and make quantity vs quality production decisions.

It would be possible to make a monster game with specific squadrons and weekly turns, but my initial thoughts are for something more playable. So my rough design parameters are:

• Game start in 1916. The was aerial activity from the beginning of the war, but it doesn’t really start heating up until then.

• Quarterly turns, so about a dozen for the entire game.

• An area map, with a number of areas roughly corresponding with the army boundaries, plus strategic bombing areas.

• Somewhat abstract counters. I’d like to use individualized types, so we’d have Sopwith Camel counters with different characteristics than the SE-5a counters. But if every counter represents a squadron, there would be an unwieldy number of pieces. So the counters need to be amalgamations of squadrons to keep things playable.

I have a prototype from many years ago that meets most of the above criteria. But I wasn’t happy with the historical accuracy, which was about at the War at Sea level. So I’m trying to reboot the effort. I may not end up with a good, playable, or even complete game, but the discussion might be interesting and perhaps at the least I might end up with a reasonable model of Great War aerial activity.