"Air combat game with plane counters" Topic

Is there a board game out there that has WW 1 air combat with plane counters such as the WW 2 tank battles games do? I look forward to your help and please let me know if the game is worth while to play.

Avalon Hill published a couple – Richthofen's War and Knights of the Air.

Dawn Patrol from TSR, now sadly OOP. But available for reasonable prices quite frequently on ebay.
Blue Max from GDW, also OOP

Wings over France, it's solitaire, but does use counters. It is an excellent game.

Aces at Dawn from MJ12 could be played with counters or miniatures.

link

There is also Wings, which is in print.

GDW first version of Blue max.
Aces high ( like Airforce and Dauntless)
Wings
Dawn patrol
richtofen war

Actually many if not all air war games can be played with counters -- you just have to introduce mechanisms to deal with certain 3D aspects of the game. I know of at least one group in Australia that does just this. They don't have room for models, mats and all the other paraphernalia generally associated with WWI air games.

That said, Blue Max is a game that readily adapts to counters.

youplay.it

Indeed you can play it on the computer!

Don't waste your money on Richtoffen's War. An OK game for the early 70's. It's time has come and gone. The only reason to pick this up is for the playing surface and the counters. The game is just bad.

Wings over France is more of a solitaire game and more of a strategic study of early 1917 IIRC. Good for one. Not so good for two or more.

mjc

"Don't waste your money on Richtoffen's War. An OK game for the early 70's. It's time has come and gone. The only reason to pick this up is for the playing surface and the counters. The game is just bad."

It is in its original form, but there was an excellent "5 second turn" variant in a copy of the General which made it a MUCH better game. I cut my WW1 aerial teeth on RW and I still go back to it from time to time.

wargamedownloads.com

Click on the search button and select WWI as time and Air as type. There are about 5 different games. These are all PnP (Print and Play) games, so you will have to mount your own counters. consimworld.com has a tutorial on how to do this.

The thing Richthofen's War needs is to break the movements into three impulses: that was the first mod we did when we adapted it back in '74 to 3D movement trollies with 1/72 scale models. The full turn lengths are too big to do all at once, making the differences in aircraft meaningless in a dogfight. Otherwise, the game mostly works OK. The vertical separation considerations are also dodgy, but that's the drawback of any boardgame simulating full 3D….