Customer Reviews

B-17 Queen of the Skies

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While modern computer games may do a better job of simulating the sights and sounds of air-combat and flying bombers over Germany, this game is MUCH more realistic in regards to understanding what was actually happening. There are a lot of charts & tables and dice-rolling, but overall you get a very realistic idea as to just how tough it was to survive 25 bombing missions!

My two brothers and I played this one repeatedly over one weekend, dividing the members of our B-17 crew evenly among us, giving them names, and cheering their successes, like when they'd shoot down an attacking German plane or complete a highly successful bombing mission. Likewise, we felt the terror of having our plane badly damaged by flak and being forced out of formation, only to then be hunted down by German fighters. Once we were even shot down, and everybody had to bail-out. Several individual crewmen didn't make it. Over the course of completing 25-missions, we felt like we'd experienced the real thing. This is an educational game that's a LOT of fun!

B-17 Queen Of The Skies

Anyone ever wonder what it was like to be part of the B-17 Crew? The friendships and the loss that came with missions?

Well B-17, at least in game fashion, gives a "feel" for the work and the heart that was part of being a bomber crewmember.

Avalon Hill's game of aerial combat,B-17 Queen Of the Skies, is a solo player game. Designed to allow some sense of participation, this game moves the player to create, manage and work his plane and crew through 25 missions, to game completion.

B-17, being a solo player game, is also document heavy. Because of the massive amount of variables, and incredible result combinations, the game has several Result Table Cards and many die role sets to help work through the missions. It also has several record-keeping sheets to maintain your current status and results.

What comes, actually, from all the paperwork, records and results tables is a sense of ownership. The responsibility of the work that it entails to create a plane and assembling a crew gives a player a feeling of involvement. The loss of any crew member or even the plane itself, give the players the same impact, just as it did to the Flight Leaders years ago.

The action has a medium pace. The moves are sometimes bogged down with having to go through the CRT cards. The pace does pickup, however, a bit, as things start happening to your plane and crew under each wave and attack sequence. The Mission Chart is laid out well so that the player can follow the results of each attack sequence. Virtually every variable was taken into account when designing this game regarding the actions and results that could happen on an attack to a B-17 bomber, and the Mission Chart helps keep good track of them.

Once well into play, a good look at the Composite Mission Record gives a player a sense and feel of what the work was like being part of this bomber crew. In reality the crewmember had only 30 percent chance surviving 25 missions during late 1942 through early 1943. Glenn Frank, the designer B-17 Queen of the Skies, spent over 600 hours researching and designing this game. Great pains were taken by the designer to visualize the actions taken by the fighters and the crews to portray their responses. Angles of attack, methods of defense and personal reactions were taken into account when designing the CRTs.

"My own bias in gaming is toward realism and accuracy, and I have always been dismayed when the designer says he sacrificed realism for play ability. In B-17 I tried to maintain both maximum realism and play ability. I think that the designer is willing to take the time, it can be done, and I hope that B-17 has given you both." -- Glenn Frank

B-17 Queen Of the Skies is an excellent solo-play game, giving players a good time and action needed in board play.

While this is certainly a better way to kill a few hours than watching TV, the topic doesn't make a very good board game.

One begins playing by putting cardboard chits (which represent the crew) in their assigned positions on a layout of the B-17. No decisions to make there. Next - determine the target to attack. This is determined by rolling the dice and looking on the target chart. No decisions to make there. You now move your B-17 marker one zone from the starting base. Do you decide how much fuel to take? No. What altitude to fly at? No. What route to take? No. How to assign fighter escort? No.

Anyway, for each zone entered the player rolls more dice and looks at more charts to determine fighter escort cover, enemy fighters, flak, etc.

You would think there'd be some excitement during an enemy fighter attack, but here's how it goes:

A) Roll for how many fighters are attacking and from which direction they are attacking.

B) Decide which guns will fire on the attacking fighters. (A decision to be made!)

C) Roll dice to see if it hits.

D) Roll to see if the fighter hits you.

E) If it does, roll to see what damage occurred.

Roll, roll, roll your dice and rarely make a decision is the theme here. While it may be realistic to have such little control over things, it makes for a dull game. Computers are much more useful for determining random results. But if this were ever ported to the computer it would be even more boring because you would only sit there and watch your B-17 plod along its pre-determined path to its pre-determined target and observe as the computer inflicts damage to your plane. The only user input would be "which gun position would you like to fire at attacking plane number one?"

There are many good WWII strategic bombing games out there - both board and computer. The key word is "strategic". Tactical level air board games are hard to find because of the fast, dynamic, 3D nature of air combat. While more difficult, games such as Clash of Arms' Achtung Spitfire are much better at portraying air combat at the tactical level while giving the player actual decisions to make (what altitude do I fly, what target to I engage, etc).

Having said all that, this does give the player a good idea of what B-17 crews had to go through to survive their 25 missions and that does give this game some value. But once you've played it several times, it will probably end up gathering dust on your shelf.

"B-17" is AH's solitaire sim of a single B-17 going 25 missions in 1943-the time of deep penetration unescorted air raids into Occupied Europe. At this time, typical aircraft and aircrew losses were approaching 15% at times, making one's chances of surviving until that 25th mission slim indeed. The game does a competent job of demonstrating this and other realities of bomber operations. It's this demonstration that in my mind ultimately dooms the game to remain on the shelf after a couple plays: nearly every event is determined randomly, very little decision making involved. Target, formation position, routing, enemy opposition all done by die rolls. While that IS realistic-to the average crew these were factors they had no control over, it doesn't make much of a game in this medium. What decision making there is is artificial-the aircraft commander (presumably the player) did not allocate which guns shot at which target. His job was to literally fly the plane, maintaining formation and situational-awareness about the threat, and friendly aircraft. The gunners themselves normally decided which targets to engage. "Realistic" decision making does happen as the crew sustains casualties. The player must move around his crew to cover empty gun positions. Enemy reaction is also by die roll, as is target obscuration, and bombing accuracy (modified by your bombardiers experience). All in all, this game is typical of the paper-and-cardboard "simulators" developed in the 1970s-80s. For its time it was probably adequate, but even when released, computer simulations were already entering the market. This game suffers from a bad choice of topic. WW2 bomber crews WERE basically subject to random events that they could not reasonably influence. But, what makes wargames/sims enjoyable is seeing and reacting to the results of the player's decisions, not simply acting as a random-events-generator. Which the paper-and-cardboard medium at the bottom line, forces one to be. As you may have guessed, I believe this is properly subject for a computer simulation. Players interested in this subject matter would be best served by purchasing one of the several excellent WW2 air combat simulators on the market.

I have owned B-17 for several years now and seem to play it regularly. Although it _is_ very mechanical there is a surprisingly high level of excitement as you fly through flak and roll to see where in the plane the flak will hit (hopefully not the bomb bay!).

The accumulating damage to the plane is one of the better aspects. You steadily build up damage to a wing or lose an engine or have wounded crew members. All of this increases the likelihood of becoming isolated or not being able to shoot at attacking planes, thus decreasing your chances for a successful return to base.

The unrealistic part comes from the number of fighters you tend to encounter - even on simple missions you can run into 3 or 4 and on long ones they just keep coming. This is not typical of the 8th Air Force's experience - often missions over France encountered no opposition and even on heavily opposed flights (e.g. Ploesti) many crews reported firing on no enemy unit.

This is one of the few games that I want to keep playing year after year. After 10 or 15 missions I put it away again. Also a good game to take on a trip as it needs very little space.