Looks like the Wildcat is out of the bag! Longtime readers might remember a blog post a few months back in which I remarked on the fact that I was working on a number of very cool secret projects all at the same time. Well, we’ve now announced one of them in our 2011 Fall Catalog, so I can finally talk a little bit about our brand-new Axis & Allies miniatures game: Axis & Allies Air Force Miniatures. We’re planning on two offerings at the end of this year: a Battle of Britain-themed Starter Set, and the Angels 20 booster set.
(I expect that like AANM/War at Sea, folks might use the names more or less interchangeably. I tend to refer to it as AAAFM, Angels 20, or sometimes just “the air game.” Whatever works for you. We thought about just calling it AA Air Miniatures, but that sort of suggests that you’re buying miniatures of air. Eventually we decided that since most of the major powers referred to their air services as “air force” or “air army” in their own languages, Air Force Miniatures was okay, even though it sounds a little anachronistic for the US. But even then the US air service was the US Army Air Force. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the term “angels 20” is military radio slang that refers to altitude: It means you’re flying at 20,000 feet.)
Anyway, I served as the lead designer on the AA Air Force Miniatures game, doing my initial design work in the spring of 2010, and coming back in December to develop and revise the game. Like most A&A fans, I’ve been fascinated by the great warbirds of WW2 all my life. Mons Johnson was my principle co-designer, and I had the assistance, playtesting, and kibitzing of Brian Hart, Ryan Miller, Steve Winter for game play. Ryan Sansaver, Brian Dumas, Nick Isaacs, and Nick Bartolli have been heavily engaged in the process of creating the CAD sculpts of the planes in our sets. All in all, it’s a dedicated and passionate group of WW2 goobs. (As an aside, we’re fortunate to have several great air museums out here in the Northwest; in the last year or so I’ve visited the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, the air museum down in Tillamook, Oregon--it’s in an old blimp hangar—and the museum up at Paine Field in Everett.)
OK, now for a few quick comments and clarifications for people who are asking questions already. First of all, a caveat: The project is still in flux in a few areas, so some details may change. Oh, and another one: It’s too early for a lot of detail, and there are a number of things I’m not going to speak to yet. That said, here are a few quick points I’d like to make:
1/100 Scale: Yep, the models are at 15mm or 1/100 scale. That means the planes are pretty sizable. A typical model is about 3.5” long with a wingspan of 4” or so. Unlike the planes in the AAM sets, the ball joint at the top of the post, not the bottom; you’ll be able to bank and pose your models. In fact, there are some gameplay elements that take advantage of this feature. The models are made of a somewhat harder plastic than the War at Sea models because stiffness is more important for wings, tails, etc., but they should still be pretty durable.
Hex-based Gameplay: Like AAM and AANM, Angels 20 isn’t a true ground-scale minis game; the models are meant to represent where a unit is and which way it’s facing, as opposed to its proportional scale distance to other units. You could certainly use our models to play true-scale games if you like, but we think playing on a grid makes for a quicker and easier beer-and-pretzels experience. The hexes are pretty big to accommodate the generously sized models, so the basic play area is 40” by 30”, like War at Sea.
New Game System: AAAFM is a new system designed to provide the best fighter-on-fighter gameplay we can deliver. The game’s stat cards present a number of traits and characteristics unique to airplanes, such as Speed, High Speed, Turn, Roll, Climb, and Dive. Some elements will be pretty familiar to existing AAM and War at Sea fans—for example, you roll attack dice a lot like War at Sea with a 6 counting as two successes, and you compare it to the target’s Armor and Vital Armor. However, pilot quality and target aspect play a big part in determining how good your attack really is.
Land Game Compatibility: The aircraft miniatures are now in proper scale with the vehicles of AAM, which is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time now. We’re not planning on providing new land-game stat cards for the new aircraft in Angels 20, but the rulebook in the Starter includes an appendix listing land-game stats for the new aircraft.
Randomization: The Starter set is “fixed,” so each starter has the same models in it. As I noted before, the Starter is themed around the Battle of Britain. The Angels 20 booster set is randomized. We’re planning on three planes to a booster. There are a total of 30 units in the booster set.
Distinct Sculpts: Right now we’ve got about 20 distinct sculpts between the starter and the booster set. Naturally, a number of pieces are “repaints” that provide different paint schemes (and stat cards) for different iterations of the same airframe. For example, we use one P-40C sculpt for an American Volunteer Group Flying Tiger, a USAAF P-40B Rookie, and a Soviet Lend-lease Tomahawk II. Basic performance numbers are pretty similar, but each has its own pilot quality and special abilities, each has its own stat card and flavor text, and each is painted appropriately. We’re reasonably careful about version accuracy; as much as we might like to say that a Bf 109F can use the same sculpt as a Bf 109E, we didn’t do that—they’re two different sculpts. Between the Starter set and the booster set, we’ve got 3 unique US sculpts, 3 unique UK sculpts, 2 unique Soviet sculpts, 2 French, 5 German, 2 Italian, and 3 Japanese. Minor countries such as South Africa, Poland, Romania, and Finland are also represented as repaints.
Well, as much as I might like to go on about all sorts of things, I have to be a little cautious in what I say at this point. When we get a little closer I’ll be happy to expand on things like gameplay and interesting units in the set, but for now, I just wanted to answer the basic question of What Is It. I hope you find it as interesting as I do!
Oh, yeah, and for you War at Sea players: This didn’t knock Set 6 out of its schedule. We’re still going ahead with Set 6, it’s just delayed a little because we ran into a bit of a bottleneck.
