Continuing the marathon of Minden Games, we have Flying Tigers. Basically an expansion to Battle over Britain. As the name implies, this expansion focuses on America vs. Imperial Japan. While it adds several campaign scenarios based on battles in the early 1940s’, it also adds a huge amount of planes. On top of the two factions, Britain and Germany, we now have America, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and China. The latter three having only one plane each, however.
However, I decided to make my own scenario, and perhaps even my own game mode: Battle Royale. Like the name implies, the Battle Royale pits a series of planes together in a huge dogfight for supremacy. Representing the countries are…
- Great Britain: Spitfire
- Nazi Germany: Me-109E
- USA/China: Tomahawk
- Japan: Nate
- Poland: P-11C
- Italy: MC-200
- Netherlands: Fokker D.XXI
Getting right into the game, most of the planes got the top advantage by being on the highest altitude. As a rule of thumb to reduce heavy duty stuff, any character who plays a court card breaks off for a round, sparing them from any attacks, but with the trade-off of not being able to fire.
The next round, in order to get away from the Nate and 109E, both of which gained advantage, I played the Queen of Spades to fly off while the Fokker and MC took fire (only the Fokker was damaged).
The next turn, Nate dealt tons of damage to Spitfire while Fokker retreated. Fourth round, my character is killed off. The first casualty of the conflict… Adding insult to injury, Fokker dies next. After a couple of rounds, the battle ends and I reshuffle the deck of discarded cards and the plane with the least amount of health getting destroyed. In this case, it’s poor Spitfire.
After a while, Germany’s hubris (he insisted on not fleeing and stay in the battle to keep his advantage) became his downfall as Japan managed to shoot him down, leaving us down to our final three. And even then, after I forgot how to draw and discard for the sake of a good fight, we end up to our final two: Italy and Japan.
And Japan won by drawing a lot of high cards and rolling pretty high. It didn’t help that I instantly had Italy’s plane pick up all the non-disengaging cards. And with that, that finishes off my seven plane blitzkrieg. It was pretty quick, but damn was it fun. I liked playing with this variation, but damn can it get hectic at times.
Battle over Britain overall is a very addictive wargame and I recommend you all to try it out.
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