The B-17 Flying Fortress was a menacing machine of the air, but it was positively frightening when it flew in formation. Skies Above the Reich is premised on a simple idea: the formation can be thought of as a terrain. For the Luftwaffe pilot tasked with the job of knocking those B-17s out of the sky, that terrain was lethal.

Geometric in nature, the terrain was knit together by arranging bombers so that the armament of one could help defend the space around its neighbors. That space was a hazardous bubble emanating out from the bomber, and although the B-17 hauled across the sky at nearly 200 miles an hour the bubble remained fixed in place around the bomber. The Skies Above the Reich board begins with that bubble.

The convention is to flatten that bubble to the image of an analog clock, segmenting it into “hours.” One oʼclock, two oʼclock, so and and so forth. Our first move was to arrange such a clock around a B-17, segmenting it into twelve arcs. The classic Avalon Hill game, B-17: Queen of the Skies, organized the board using the same clock system. It regulated how enemy fighters came into play to give grief to the bomber.

Skies Above the Reich involves more than a single B-17, however, so the clock bubble is not so much a terrain but a node within the larger landscape. Actually, it is an organizing mechanism giving shape to that landscape. Zoom out from the individual bomber in order to take in a larger picture and we get a view of a bomber “element,” three B-17s arranged in a triangle, but some detail drops away. The hours blur into larger “positions,” each relative to its bomber, the target. A front and a back, and two sides.

Attacks from six oʼclock and adjacent hours are more likely to hit the mark than those located in one of the flank positions. At the scale of an element the differences between adjacent hours drop away. We simplify by grouping three hours into a single position, aggregating them into a single “approach.” Attacking a B-17 from the front, or “nose” position was very different than attacking it from the more traditional position of the “tail,” in the neighborhood of six oʼclock. That was the reliable approach because the relative speeds of fighter and bomber made aiming easier. Early on, Luftwaffe pilots closed in from behind, but found that the twin 50 caliber guns on the bomberʼs tail could give as good as they got, and the ventral and top turret gunners could also join the party making that approach rather dangerous. Add fire from the rest of the element, and just like that you have a fighter pilot who is willing to spend maybe only a second or two in position before breaking away to safety. Soon fighters chose other angles of approach and our design intent was to provide a system whereby the player understands why pilots opted for a change. This understanding is achieved by playing.

Extending the lines demarcating Nose from Flank, and Flank from Tail, they intersect lines emanating from neighboring bubbles. This mutual extension with multiple intersections develop a grid of sorts, with bombers located at intersections while fighters negotiate the cells of the grid, each cell the shape of a diamond derived from three hours glommed together.

Luftwaffe fighters approach from the safe perimeter into the dangerous interior of the formation, or maybe just the less safe edge, and back out again. All that is up to the player. Spaces are graded according to their potential lethality to the fighter. In this game fighters do not move space by space across the map. That would be tedious; a slow motion rendering of events. An attack run is handled more quickly than that, but more about that in another article.

The grid allows us to handle the basic three bomber element, the building block of the combat box formation, and by extending lines further we can accommodate larger fragments of the group formation. The only problem is that the grid is two dimensional while the formation was a three dimensional structure. The game board is stuck in its two dimensions, a necessary handicap when working within the confines of a game.

Even the “bubble” superimposed on the B-17 was a three dimensional field of fire, not a flat clock.

Graphically, rather than render a top down view of aircraft, or an elevation view (that is, from the side), we present a three quarter view in order to signal the three dimensionality of that environment. We also shrink the size of bombers that were arranged lower in the formation in comparison to those that were higher. The board has big B-17s and small ones, because of where they are vertically. Hopefully this visual strategy sets the proper mood, reminding the player that the game represents actions taking place in three dimensions. Yet, it is cosmetic.

Relative altitude was not trivial, it was fundamental to the combat box as a terrain and to the Luftwaffeʼs tactics in attacking it. Indeed, the game system governing attack makes it an important feature among a matrix of factors that include position and range. But more about that later.

Weʼll leave you with an anecdote lifted from Cajus Bekker, author of The Luftwaffe War Diaries:

“Flying parallel with the formation, he looked for a chance to attack. Unlike British bombers the B-17s had a ventral turret carrying heavy twin machine-guns. The whole aircraft bristled with guns, leaving no blind spots. But suddenly Jabs detected a gap in the formation, and followed by his No. 2 darted into it. The attack came just in time to divert the enemyʼs fire from Schererʼs plane, which had already been hit. The latter was forced to break away, with both of its crew wounded by splinters.”

Author: Jeremy (Jerry) White