Cleared for Take Off - Blood Red Skies

Sorry for the delay posting, it has been a busy couple of weeks on the gaming front. I've been to Salute, the Lardies released What a Tanker, Warlord started shipping Blood Red Skies, and I went to "WorLard" - I'll start with Blood Red Skies.

It has certainly been a while coming, and technically the retail release date is May, but the "pre order" stock has been shipped and as some of that is with distributors it is now pretty much generally available. That raises an interesting thought - if Warlord are holding their game for a later retail date than the distributors are they not missing out on possible sales themselves? Answers and thoughts in the comments below please.

Anyway the two player starter set has arrived Chez Renko, along with a Squadron of Yaks and an Ace for the Brits, Germans and Russians. There are plenty of "unboxing" articles and videos in places like Beasts of War so I wont bother with that, but I will give my general thoughts.

Firstly the box is very nice - well designed with all the bits in a clear plastic tray. - It looks more commercial than the usual stuff we associate with wargames and is I think designed to be played straight from the box with minimal assembly if you want. The quality of the supporting material is also good, nice heavy duty punch board counters and clouds etc and....

er what's that? Stop padding and get to the main point - the toys and how it plays? OK

So the toys. You get six Spitfires MkIIs and six Me109 Es. They're plastic, with Spitfires coloured brown and Me109s grey - and some of them are going to be clearly warped. This isn't a problem as they respond immediately to a nice hot water bath. The plastic is a bit flexible - certainly not the hard injection moulded stuff we expect from Warlord in the past, but I suspect that is deliberate (more later). The Spitfire is the nicer of the two models imho with little or no real faults. The 109 is less easy to love, with a strange bend to the bottom of the fuselage, rather clunky wings and the wrong panel lines for an E version. Having said all that they paint up nicely and are actually fun to paint too.

I've not painted the Spitfires yet but will do so "soon". I have painted up the Yak 1 Squadron box. This contains six Yaks and all the required bits to play, this time in a proletarian green plastic. These also painted up fast and easy, as shown below.

I was watching "The Attackers" on Amazon and all the Yaks are streaked with soot and dirt so I thought - "why not?"

The model again is not too bad at all - a bit thick through the fuselage - "Phat Yak" syndrome, but nice enough.

Ok back to why they're not the usual hard plastic. I think this is deliberate. BRS models are going to take a lot of handling as their Advantage status changes, so they need to be robust. They are also not targeting the rivet counting market, aiming for gaming piece quality rather than model quality. The choice of a slightly more flexible plastic and omission of details that would easily snap off will avoid sad piles of broken gun barrels and radio aerials (I'm looking at you Wings of Glory) - it's a trade off. Similarly the models come with basic self adhesive stickers NOT decals - another nod towards the "open the box and play" idea. Warlord are planning to sell more detailed waterslide decals and there are other suppliers (the ones in my pics are from 1:144 Direct on ebay - confusingly they're 1:200)

Now the important bit. The game plays VERY well. My initial thoughts \ concerns that I would struggle controlling more than 4 planes has gone - I played 8 Yaks and it worked fine - possibly helped by getting bounced on turn 1 and being reduced to 7 before any of my planes moved, but...

I think Warlord may have got this right, and although I can (and have) picked fault with just about every model, they do the job they're designed for well. The game is quick to learn and play in basic mode but surprisingly nuanced once you include the cards and advanced rules included in the starter set. There are some detail problems they should have caught earlier - the measuring stick thingy is a PITA to use and I have a sneaking suspicion it may be a bit "wrong" but as long as everyone uses the same it doesn't matter. Similarly there are a couple of typos that probably should have been fixed but were not. None of that detracts from the game as a whole.

Happy to recommend this one

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Cheers