Wing Leader: Blitz Review
Wing Leader: Blitz is the first expansion for Lee Brimmicombe-Wood’s air combat system at GMT Games, and the first thing to know is what it is not. It is not a game. You need Wing Leader: Victories 1940-1942 on the table to use any of it — the box holds a campaign booklet, an 11x17 campaign map, one countersheet, two sheets of Aircraft Data Cards and a player aid, and no rulebook at all.
Buy it if Victories has stopped surprising you and you want a campaign rather than a series of one-off engagements. Skip it if you are still learning the base game, because Blitz assumes the system is already automatic for you.
The side-view map is the whole system
Most air combat games look down at the battle from above and record altitude as a number on the counter. Wing Leader turns the board on its side. The map is an elevation view, the vertical axis is height, and where an aircraft sits on the board is its altitude.
That sounds cosmetic and is not. It means altitude is public, contested space rather than bookkeeping. You can see the formation stacked above yours, you can see the gap it has to cross to reach you, and you can see what it costs to climb into that gap. Diving buys speed and gives away height; climbing buys height and bleeds speed. Both players watch the trade happen.
The consequence is that engagements are decided before contact. By the time formations meet, the advantage has usually already been won or thrown away by whoever managed their height better in the approach — which is a fair reflection of how the real thing worked, and unusual for a game that fits on a table.
Expect 90-120 minutes for a scenario once you know the rules, less for the learning ones. The rulebook is dense, and two or three sessions is a realistic estimate before it stops feeling like consulting a manual.
What Blitz actually adds
The headline is the campaign system for the early weeks of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Barbarossa is the right fit for this system precisely because it was not a fair fight: a campaign frame turns individual scenarios into a sequence where losses carry forward, which is where an attritional air war becomes interesting rather than repetitive.
Around it sit scenarios from four theatres that share nothing except being under-served elsewhere:
- France, with Dewoitine D.520s against German Heinkels
- Nomonhan, Japanese Ki-27s against the Soviets — an undeclared border war that almost no game touches
- Malta and the Mediterranean, Royal Navy Fulmars and Martlets meeting Italian torpedo bombers during Operation Pedestal
- New Guinea, P-39D Airacobras against Japanese invasion forces
The new aircraft follow the same logic. The Soviet I-16, I-153 and MiG-3, the Curtiss Hawk 75, the French M.S.406 and MB.152C — these are the machines that lost the early war, and they exist here so you can fly the losing side properly instead of only the famous fighters.
Blitz is also the first title in the series with markers for tracking bomb damage, which matters more than a marker sheet usually does: it means a bomber force can be measured by what it achieved on the ground rather than only by how many of it came home.
What it costs and what you get
Thirty-nine dollars for a booklet, a countersheet, two card sheets and an 11x17 map is not obviously good value on component weight, and anyone judging by the size of the box will feel short-changed.
The honest framing is that you are buying scenarios and a campaign structure, not materials. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how much you play Victories. For someone who has run the base scenarios repeatedly, a campaign system and four fresh theatres is exactly the right purchase. For someone who plays twice a year, it is $39 of content that will sit unused next to a game that already has more scenarios than they will get through.
The rules are Living Rules, currently at version 2.02, with translations available in Italian, French, Russian and Slovakian — worth knowing, because a system this dense benefits from the errata being maintained rather than frozen at print.
What works and what does not
Works well:
- The side-view map makes altitude a visible, contested resource instead of a recorded number.
- The Barbarossa campaign gives losses consequences beyond a single scenario.
- Four theatres that other air combat games largely ignore, especially Nomonhan.
- Aircraft from the losing side of the early war, modelled as they actually performed.
- Bomb damage tracking, a first for the series.
Does not:
- Requires Victories 1940-1942. This is not a way into the system.
- Dense rules, and the expansion does nothing to soften the learning curve.
- Thin component value for $39 if you measure it by what is in the box.
- The campaign only rewards you if you commit to a sequence of sessions.
Verdict
8/10. As an expansion it does the right job: it extends the system sideways into theatres and aircraft the base game skipped, and adds a campaign frame that makes attrition mean something. It is held back only by the thing every expansion is held back by — it is worth nothing on its own.
Buy it if Wing Leader: Victories is already a game you return to. Start with Victories if it is not, and note that the series continues with Eagles, Origins, Legends and Supremacy if you get on with the side-view approach.
Deja un comentario