Developing the second volume of Wing Leader was supposed to be so simple. I would assemble some new aircraft data cards, throw together some scenarios, kick it out the door, then. . . profit!

It all went wrong when people started to LIKE the first volume, Wing Leader: Victories. The problem when people like your game is that they play it. They play it a lot. They push the system and ask awkward questions. (What bastards!) Next thing you know, you’re responding to the feedback, tweaking rules, nerfing some values while buffing others. The game evolves!

There are all sorts of pitfalls associated with evolving a system. The designer might go off the rails and start making major revisions based on Things He Didn’t Like first time around, or superfans get design privileges so that the lunatics get the run of the asylum. If you are not careful you can end up with a game very different from the first edition. In turn this runs the danger of splitting the game community, or resigning them to navigating their way around multiple rule editions, some of which are more popular than others.

Wing Leader had to evolve, but I didn’t want to blow up the community. If there had to be change, it had to be gradual, measured, minimal. The aim had to be to make the second edition rules the definitive set.

Prompted by some of the superfans, who had come on board the project, the changes began to separate into a number of categories.

By far the biggest category was changes to the rules text, designed to clarify the mechanics, resolve edge cases and phasing issues, close out loopholes and suchlike. I’ve learned, from long experience, to listen carefully to player feedback, to player questions, or simply read all the after action reports. This sometimes requires forensic skill, because it’s not immediately obvious if players are making errors or doing unexpected things. Usually, they think they are playing correctly. On a number of occasions I stumbled across places where players interpreted the rules to mean the opposite of what was intended. When this happened I had to go back to the rules text and interrogate it closely. Where did I fail to communicate well? Can this be drafted better? I began with the assumption that this was MY failure, not the players. Yes, gamers can be obtuse sometimes, but too often the problem comes from a text draft that is not working hard enough to communicate the designer’s intent. The finger points only at me and my desire to use terse language, to make economies on text. These things were salvaged by wrestling with the rule drafting and in many cases expanding the verbiage.

The rules for dogfights and Lufberys required tweaking between editions, in the case of the latter ‘nerfing’ (reducing) the effect of the Lufbery defence.

A second category of changes were for those rules that had been written as placeholders for the second volume—late war features such as the jet mechanics and heavy bomber defence. These rules hadn’t been adequately tested because they were not used in the first game. So the jet rules were a little overcooked, with opaquely written combat modifiers. Similarly, the heavy bomber rules didn’t stand up to prolonged test. In their original form they generated too much die rolling and the players were asking for something simpler and less process-heavy. Then there were the rules for heavy guns and rockets, which were in desperate need of streamlining.

Amongst this second category of rules also comes examples of undercooked rules, most notably those for fighter-bombers, where the changing roles—is it a bomber? Is it a fighter?—generated a raft of questions that needed further clarification.

A third category of change was where we needed to tweak the game; where more intensive testing revealed overpowered or underpowered features. One example of this was the Lufbery rules, which were felt to be overpowered. Far too often the Lufbery was the default tactic of choice rather than a fall-back for a weak defender. A slight change to the modifiers were necessary to put the mechanic back into balance.

Another tweak was applied to tallying, where it was felt it was too easy to obtain tallies, with the result that surprise attacks were too easy to foil. A minor tweak so that tallying squadrons had to roll GREATER than the distance to the target, instead of equal to or greater, had the desired effect. It shifted the mean success probability at three squares distance (i.e. 3 MP of movement) to 1 in 2 rather than 2 in 3.

A fourth and final category of change was to fix some of the unwanted behaviours the game was generating. One of these was bomber behaviour, where it felt that bombers were unhistorically turning for home too early. The main change here was to permit bomber squadrons that were broken to continue onwards to the target, but to render them ineffective as a fighting force. This gave us both the correct behaviour and the correct historical output.

Another example of an unwanted behaviour was where a fighter squadron found itself stacked with a hostile enemy, but not in a dogfight. The first edition rules would pretty much trap the squadron in place. A new free movement rule made it much clearer what the player could do to disentangle themselves from such a situation, and make the ’tar trap’ effect of a dogfight more stark.

The rules for jets underwent an evolution, to simplify and streamline them, while incentivising correct doctrine. The rules for mutual support between heavy bombers also got a makeover.

It was vital that all these changes didn’t invalidate the first volume. The rules had to be completely backwards-compatible with minimal effect on the balance of the first volume’s scenarios. We were not reinventing anything here—rather fixing problems that had come to light since the game was first released. Overall, the changes are minimal and, I trust, uncontroversial.

At the time of writing I am about to deliver all the files for Wing Leader: Supremacy to GMT. With luck, we are done with the rules set now, barring any minor errata that emerges. The rules set is fixed forever and with the two core games shipped, we can look forward to the challenge of expansion sets, that add more aircraft, scenarios and (gasp!) campaigns!

Who knows? Maybe all I’ll need to do is assemble some new aircraft data cards, throw together some scenarios, kick it out the door, and then. . . profit!

Well, a man can dream. . .

Author: Lee Brimmicombe-Wood