Blood Red Skies Retrospective

Blood Red Skies (BRS) has been out for a couple of months. Written by "veteran" games designer Andy Chambers and available from Warlord Games. Now the bloom of enthusiasm has worn off, I thought it worth having a warts and all look at the game.

So what do you get for your £40 RRP?

Assuming you have bought or are looking at buying the starter set you get quite a lot. Six Spitfires, six Me109Es, bases, skill disks, cards, dice, rules, scenarios, measuring sticks, cloud and bomber templates and counters. You also get three rule books - basic rules, Advanced Rules and Scenarios.  Its all well made, the card parts particularly are excellent quality and look the business. There is a nice Art Decor theme to the graphics which ties it all together well.  The models are pre-coloured - brown for the Brits, grey for Germans, and they come with some stickers for national emblems which are clearly there for six year-olds but add little or nothing to the more experienced war gamer. I think Warlord hope to sell the game as playable out of the box, with no painting or assembly needed, possibly hoping to get it into non war gaming players?

There are some annoying issues however.

The models are prone to warping - particularly the Spitfires wings. This can be fixed with a quick dip in hot water to straighten them, and is nothing unusual with plastic models. The problem is there seems to be a tendency for that to be repeated, and sometimes it is quite serious. I don't think I would be keen on having to regularly dip painted models in hot water. The 109 is also a strange model in that it seems to be a "generic" 109 with some features of different versions. There is a more detailed look at them on an earlier post.  The models also seem to be a little under 1:200 scale - no idea why as the resin masters I saw were spot on so clearly a production issue (China I presume). They are in the "gaming piece" rather than "model" end of the scale - but serviceable non the less and they paint up really well.

Then there's the "cool" measuring template. It looks quite nice, but about thirty seconds into your first game you realise that when you use it you have to place the model on top of the template then remove the template -  it is a bit of a faff on. Later it becomes apparent that for some reason the actual measuring scale is wrong at the far end of the scale - I can only assume the original got re-scaled somewhere along the line. This isn't a problem if both players use the same tool, but as soon as someone starts to use a tape measure it becomes one because they go further! There are also a couple of typos (we all make mistooks) and some of the wording and diagrams seem less clear than they could be, leading to some confusion when playing. This last is causing some comment from ex X Wing players who are used to a much more precise style of rules writing than the historical guys.

The "Advantage" bases are pretty nice too. These are a clever pivoting base that is used to represent status on the table - reducing the need for counters and therefore table clutter, and after several months of playing mine still retain the necessary "click" that makes them work. I have heard some people don't like them, but if they bother you that much you could just use counters.

The Basic rules work well, and certainly will hit the casual gamer target audience. The Advanced Rules introduce card play which adds an additional level of game play and detail that will give more interest and longevity. The six Scenarios are designed to guide the player through the concepts in easy steps - which they mostly do, although I must admit the bomber escort scenario is one that could have used a bit more polishing as the interaction between the rules for multi engine aircraft and loaded bombers seems to confuse some people.

The rules are slick and give a fast game that does not, as someone else said rather cruelly but with some truth about another set of WW2 dogfight rules, feel like "Penguins on roller skates". The "Advantage" system manages to give a fast flowing and fluid game in 2D that represents the essence of a swirling dogfight in 3D, situation constantly changing. Initiative means even a poor pilot can get the drop on an Ace if he is set up right, but Pilot Skill is everything when you get into a dogfight, which is as it should be, and even a marginal skill advantage can really turn the tables.  Gunnery is easy to understand and again flows well, and the adoption of the "Boom Chit" as a morale \ fuel \ ammunition count system for air games is both novel and interesting. The card play is interesting too,  a bit clunky at times but adds a real extra dimension to the game.

There has been some criticism about the balance of the starter set, with the 109s being overpowered by the Spitfires, but I think this is a learning curve issue - basically the Spitfire gets the "Tight Turn" trait card, which is easy to use and because you have one per plane you are pretty much golden in a straight turn fight. The 109 has Great Climb and Great Dive. These are harder to get the most out of, particularly Great Dive, but once players understand Great Climb, and use it as often as they can, then the 109 really starts to compete - which is another way of saying "don't turn fight a Spitfire in a 109", which seems spot on to me.

The other criticism levelled with some validity is the choice of planes in the initial release. In addition to the 109E and Spitfire MkII Warlord have released a Yak 1, A6M5 Zero, and a P51D - all available in Squadron boxes of 6 with all the cards etc you need to play them and colour coded - another nod at "out of the box" and casual gamers. For the historical gamers this choice really causes problems as the Zero is the late version and the P51D is way out of sync with the others as far as service dates goes. Warlord are working on new releases, but having set their standards at pre coloured plastic there is a significant delay before any new releases - Wave 2 is Fw190, Hurricane, Me110 and Mosquito, but no official release date has yet been announced other than some time this year.

So is it worth it?

In my opinion , Oh YES. Possibly the most innovative set of rules out there for years. They're far from perfect and still need some polish - odd rough edge smoothed off, but I suspect BRS is going to be around for quite some time if Warlord get the support for it right.