Eagle Leader Expansion 3: Italian Air Force
Eagle Leader Expansion 3 gives you the Aeronautica Militare in a 1980s NATO war that never happened, and it is built around a problem rather than a roster: Italy had one air force and two fronts to cover with it.
Buy it if you already own the Eagle Leader core game and want a campaign where the constraint is geography rather than opposition quality. Check availability first, though — DVG lists the $139.99 core game as sold out, and this $39.99 expansion is useless without it.
Two fronts, one air force
DVG describes Italy as split between helping the Greeks on the Mediterranean front and supporting NATO in Germany. That single sentence is the whole design brief.
Most national expansions in this kind of series hand you a set of aircraft and a theatre. This one hands you a commitment problem. Central Front Germany is where the Warsaw Pact’s weight would have fallen; the Mediterranean is where Italy’s own coastline, bases and interests sat. An air force that has to be credible in both is an air force that is thin in each, and a campaign built on that premise asks you to decide what you are willing to leave uncovered.
The opposition reflects the same spread. Alongside the expected Warsaw Pact forces, the expansion puts Libyan and Syrian aircraft in front of you — an acknowledgement that Italy’s southern flank was not a quiet sector waiting for the main event.
A fleet spanning three decades
The aircraft DVG names tell you what kind of force this was:
- The Panavia Tornado IDS, the multinational strike aircraft that was Italy’s serious modern capability
- The AMX A-11 Ghibli, the Italian-Brazilian light attack aircraft built for battlefield interdiction
- The Fiat G.91, a light fighter-bomber whose design dates to the 1950s and which was still in service
That is not a balanced modern fleet; it is a real one. A Tornado and a G.91 are separated by roughly a generation and a half of capability, and having both on your roster means the interesting decisions happen at assignment rather than in the air. Sending the Tornado where it matters is easy. Working out which mission you are prepared to give the G.91 is the actual game.
This is where the expansion earns its place over a straightforward “new planes” add-on. Fielding obsolescent aircraft is a genuine command problem, and very few games model it as anything other than a lower attack value.
What Eagle Leader is, if you have not played it
Eagle Leader is a solitaire game designed by Philip S. Bolger-Cortez and Benjamin Chee, based on Dan Verssen’s Hornet Leader, and released in 2023 as a core game plus these eight expansions. It sits in DVG’s long-running Air Leader series alongside Hornet Leader, Phantom Leader, Stuka Leader and Zero Leader. Sessions run roughly 45 to 120 minutes.
You are not flying an aircraft. You are the officer choosing which pilots and airframes go against which targets, and living with the results across a campaign. Each campaign has Short, Medium and Long durations that set how many days you fly, how many Special Option points you get to spend, and the victory points you need to succeed.
The part that makes a national roster matter is squadron selection. You build your squadron by pilot skill — a Short campaign gives you eight aircraft split one Newbie, two Green, four Average, one Skilled — and the F-15C is the price baseline. Better aircraft cost Special Option points; worse aircraft refund them. So an air force with obsolescent types is not simply a weaker one: it is one that buys you budget elsewhere.
The other constraint is people rather than machines. Damaged aircraft repair overnight, but pilots accumulate Stress from every mission and shed it only at their Cool rating, and a pilot who tips into Unfit cannot fly at all. What limits tomorrow’s sortie is almost never the hardware.
Where it sits among the eight expansions
Eagle Leader has eight expansions, and they are not interchangeable:
- Luftwaffe and RAF
- Hellenic Air Force
- Italian Air Force
- French Air Force
- Minor NATO
- Aces
- Experimental Aircraft
- Japan Air Self Defense Force
The first five are national forces, and the useful way to choose between them is by what problem each nation had. Expansion 1 gives you the two air arms NATO’s Central Front actually leaned on. Expansion 2 gives you Greece, outmatched and facing the Soviet Black Sea Fleet with three generations of fighters. This one gives you a middling power stretched across two theatres.
Italy is arguably the most interesting of the three precisely because it is neither the strongest nor the most desperate. Expansions 6 through 8 are a different proposition — Aces and Experimental Aircraft change the roster rules rather than the strategic picture.
What works and what does not
Works well:
- The two-front premise gives the campaign a shape most national expansions lack.
- A genuinely mixed-generation fleet, with the G.91 as a real command problem rather than a weak card.
- Libyan and Syrian opposition, which almost nothing else covers.
- Fits the Air Leader system’s strength: decisions before the mission, not during it.
Does not:
- Requires the Eagle Leader core game, which is currently sold out at the publisher.
- $39.99 for an expansion whose base game may be hard to source.
- Solitaire only, so there is no group use for it.
- If the Cold-War-gone-hot premise does not appeal, nothing here will change that.
Verdict
8/10. A national expansion is worth owning when the nation had an interesting problem, and Italy in the 1980s did: modern strike aircraft, obsolescent fighters, and two theatres that both needed covering. That is more to think about than a stronger air force would give you.
The score is held down by availability rather than design. Confirm you can get the Eagle Leader core game before spending anything on this, and if you are choosing your first national expansion and the core game is in hand, this or the Hellenic Air Force set are the two that change how the campaign plays rather than just what flies in it.
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