Flash Review — Eagles in the Sky

Players: 2 
Age: 12+ 
Playtime: 15-240 min (for the campaign game!)
Complexity: 8/10

Take to the heavens in your trusty Sopwith Camel and try to get into an advantageous position behind that Fokker DR.I with the red livery... before he does it do you first.

Games that model air combat during the Great War are few and far between, which makes Eagles in the Sky all the more inviting. And coming from Revolution Games, the package was too hard to resist.

The game runs on a system of relative positions: there's no map across which aircraft glide and try to find each other. Rather, if you spot an enemy at your altitude (or manage to climb or dive to meet them there), you can play a card whose value gets added to the relevant maneuver rating of your aircraft. And if the opponent can't match that sum, you'll find yourself tailing them and in a position to shoot. Then it's all a matter of better exploiting the enemy's weaknesses so you can improve your position and keep tailing them until you can send their flying machine down in flames. 
But that's assuming they won't manage to shake you off their tail—or worse, turn the tables and start shooting back!

A single engagement (either historical with set parameters, or generated randomly using a series of handy tables) can be over in as few as 15 action-packed minutes. The real jewel, however, is to be found in the campaign system, which strings together four intense days of sorties with a variety of missions: strafing trenches, taking down balloons, bombing enemy positions, the classic patrol, and more.

Be mindful of the weather, track your hardware, repair and replace aircraft, train new pilots, and just pray they survive long enough to get better at the job and—we can only hope—one day turn into aces.

Most easily forgotten rule: When you're tailing an aircraft in a climb, you can only attack it using a Climb maneuver card.


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