Fight In the Skies / Dawn Patrol

 

FIGHT IN THE SKIES / DAWN PATROL

Company: TSR; Type: Ameristyle; Players: 2-12; Time: up to 2 hours; Genre: Dogfight; 

Rating: 💥💥💥💥💥 I love it!

This was the first "wargame" I learned in our Strategy & Tactics Club in HS. (And it also inaugurated my journey into becoming an amateur historian of WWI.) The version I knew then was called Fight In The Skies (TSR 1975) and was the fifth edition and was designed by Mike Carr.

It was a grid-based game that simulated WWI dogfighting in a variety of historical aircraft, primarily along the Western Front. We used to call it Luck In the Skies for the high degree of chance involved. The system used 2D6 and involved dice rolls for everything: 

Initiative, Gun Jams, Chance to Hit, Hit Factors, Hit Locations, Critical Hits, Pilot Hits, Pilot Wounds, Consciousness, Overdives, Chances of Crashing, and so on.

Percentage chances for everything were also based on the bell curve of 2D6. So, a 5% chance of something happening was to roll an 11, a 10% chance would be a roll of 9, etc. (As a human outlier for bad luck, I was usually on the wrong side of the results. Lost many, many plans -- but never a pilot!) I would rue this, but after reading many accounts of early flight and dogfighting, the very swingy-ness of it all captures the experience and period quite well.

Learning the performance characteristics of each aircraft and the tactics of the period were crucial for improved performance when playing the game. You developed your favorite airframes -- when flying British, for me, it was the SE5 / SE5a and when flying German, it was the Albatros DV / Albatros DVa. You could set up a simple dogfighting scenario in just a few minutes by rolling for combat date and for available aircraft on just a few relevant tables.

In 1982, TSR released the retitled seventh edition as Dawn Patrol and added some historical roleplaying tables for nationality, military awards, and pilot advancement from aircraft to aircraft over time. In college, we ran a chronological campaign where we actually experienced the advancement of aircraft month-by-month from early 1917 to the end of the war November 1918.

I can't tell you how much joy I've gotten out of playing this game. (But not one Ace!) Trivia Fact: FITS / Dawn Patrol is the only gaming event to be featured at every Gen Con since its inception back in 1968!

--LM