From: Tom Huntington Description: Re: WWI Dogfighting game recommendations? In article Richard Bell, rlbell@sunee.uwaterloo.ca writes: >Knights of the Air seems to be a rewrite of Richtofen's War Knights of the Air was a true passion for me and my gang for a while, although it has been many years now since we played. The dynamics of the basic game are beautiful -- it is certainly NOT a rewrite of Richtoffen's War. The ground scale is much smaller, so airplanes with tighter turning radiuses (radii?) reflect directly onto the mapsheet, instead of Richtoffen's obscure loss of speed for degree of turn relationship. KotA wonderfully depicts the decrease of engine performance at high altitudes -- doesn't change your airplane's speed much (because there's less drag), but you lose maneuverability compared to low altitudes when engines can muscle air much easier. Basically the game is an I-move-you-move system, but during your opponent's turn you can interrupt once and move a distance proportional to the amount of time spent during his movement, likewise interrupt your turn and make him move his proportional distance. You can try for the coveted prize of shooting him once on your turn and once on his turn, but the opportunity is rare. There is also a well-done maneuver commitment system that lets you begin to do tricky maneuvers (like an Immelman turn) towards the end of one turn, and let's you pause halfway through the maneuver for your opponent's turn, and then let you resume your maneuver on your next turn. Nicely done. The rules are alarmingly incomplete in some areas for Avalon Hill (like defining shot modifiers and blind spots for rear-firing guns), and the author retired from the Hill long ago. There are many favorite airplanes left out of the system, but most the late war planes are included. The game components also absolutely limit the number of players to something like no more than six or eight. The advanced rules are so obscure that they don't make sense unless you read the designer's notes that were published in an archaic issue of the General. When the rules define how to calculate your machine-gun's target area based on the angle of descent of your airplane, we all agreed this was a little too complicated to still be fun to play. But the mechanics of the basic game are still a marvel, and I sincerely enjoyed the game for many hours. I still deeply resent the price markdown since it's release -- I popped $35 for it when it came out, in a time when I had to really scrape to find that kind of money. I think it sells for $25 these days. A hearty thumbs up, with the conditional warning that we don't play it much anymore. Tom Huntington