Nostalgia News

I was painting some figures a few days ago and a friend of mine came around and spotted some 1/300th biplanes in the lead pile. He was far more interested in them than any of the other figures.  That got me thinking about World War 1 dogfighting rules.  Now I know they say nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I started thinking about some old air combat games that might have stood the test of time.

The game that came to mind was the SPI board game Flying Circus.  It was published way back in 1972.  By modern standards it wasn't a complex game and the flight mechanics are very basic but when I was at University it was a firm favourite because it was easy to teach to new players and they could get right into the action.

Back then Flying Circus was our Sunday evening group game.  It was something all the club members could join in with without too much trouble.  We put an extended map together to make a bigger playing area and created statistics for additional aircraft.  Sometimes there are unexpected benefits to having mathematicians in a wargames club.  He also created some additional rules for combat results to add some granularity to the game.  We ran a campaign where the calendar moved forward a month each week.  This gave us a way to introduce new aircraft as they became historically available.  we also had a campaign rule that meant the current highest scoring pilot on each side got first refusal on new planes.  This gave us a motivation to get stuck into the action.

A bit of digging in my archive (OK its a big cardboard box in the spare bedroom) and I found a copy of the original rules.  I ran a copy of them off back in the day so I had all the statistics for the planes that came in the game.  It still holds up as a basic starting point for a game with 1/300th models.  So its time to draw up some additional rules to create a game using models.

So now I'm into nostalgia gaming and  I think I want to play Starforce Alpha Centauri again.  Time for a trip down to the archives.