For some reason I felt the need to pick up something that brings me back to the original tabletop gaming that I used to play, in my early teens: historical wargaming. I had a few Avalon Hill games that I played, namely War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific. Through high school we mostly played Star Fleet Battles, moving toward RPGs during senior year. But we did find time to try games like Top Gun and Flight Leader.
The big difference back then was that the wargames were rarely designed for solitaire play, and when I didn’t have anyone to play with I ended up playing both sides of a conflict.
In the past few years I had bought a tabletop modern aircraft wargame which used miniatures, but once again I had no one to play with, so I just painted up a bunch of the minis and left them in a storage box somewhere in the house.
Finally, I came across this:
I’d been eyeing Phantom Leader and Hornet Leader for a while now, along with a couple of submarine games (U-Boat Leader/Gato Leader). I finally chose this one because I remember the F-4 Phantom as the cool looking fighter jet of my youth. Both the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds used them for their airshows back in the day.
Unlike my old standby, B-17: Queen of the Skies, these games have a political factor in each mission. If you bomb too big a target, politics may slow you down and limit the number of potential targets in later missions, but if you don’t strike hard enough, you could end up losing the campaign and the war.
This game should arrive sometime this weekend. If I end up liking it I may pick up Hornet Leader later.
