Flame wars, don’cha love ‘em? Gets the blood up. Keeps me alive and truckin’. This post begins with one of those online feuds in which grown men rhetorically whack each other round the head with saucepans until one side is exhausted or goes completely loopy and starts chewing the walls. In this fight my opponent’s parting shot was to wish me well with my Wing Leader ‘art project’. It was snide diminution of my game and I could cheerfully have lobbed a brick back. But like the best barbs it had hooks of truth. Wing Leader IS an art project. A damned big one. I told myself I might as well own the idea.
The benefit of being an artist-designer is that you can make a game look exactly like you want. There’s no other vision mediating the final experience. But there’s another benefit: the art and the design are intertwined. Sometimes the design is driven by the visual/tactile game experience. Art can inspire the design.
It’s true of my earlier games but it is especially true of Wing Leader.
I make no secret of Wing Leader’s origins. Back in the ‘70s I remember riffling through my brother’s copies of Airfix Magazine and finding rules by Mike Spick for an air combat miniatures wargame. Spick’s concept was ingenious: take plastic aircraft kits and split them in half along the centreline. Then play the game as if looking from the side. A picture says a thousand words so here are some from Spick’s game*.
See? What a wonderful idea. The game instantly communicates that most important of aviation qualities–altitude–and it looks fantastic. I told myself I’d steal that idea and use it one day.
There’s a second origin story for Wing Leader and it begins with a whim. I wanted to play a WW2 game with Italian aircraft in. I’m fond of the Italian air force, and though I’d managed to shoehorn them a guest spot in my Battle of Britain game, The Burning Blue, that was not the best showcase for the Regia Aeronautica. Italian pilots had proven themselves able opponents in other theatres, despite flying aircraft that were underpowered. And they flew such pretty ‘planes too, with lovely lines and jazzy colour schemes. If the Italians had anything, it was a pile of style.
This brought me back to contemplating a game that could really show off the coolness of the Italians. It seemed to me that the side view caught the lines of a Folgore fighter in ways no top-down view could. And I’d been itching to do a side-on game since my teens, to really highlight what altitude brought to an aerial fight.
The design was on.
It seems odd to admit that a design was initiated by strong visuals, by the desire to create aircraft porn. But there you have it. Once I had a framework for the Italians, all sorts of other ‘planes suggested themselves. Spitfires, Zeroes, Mustangs all look their prettiest from the side. The traditional top-down view never captures the essence of a aeroplane but the side elevation communicates their power and their signature lines.
It also shows off the aircraft’s heraldry. Not only badges and shark mouths but also squadron codes and flashes. Just look at these Hurricane counters. The underlying aircraft is the same, but the paint schemes and bold squadron codes make them appear very different.
All of a sudden I found myself with a logistic problem. In other air games I’d been able to produce a small number of aircraft art pieces and clone them as necessary. But cloning was not possible in this game. I had to produce a separate piece of art for 220 aircraft counters! And they had to be double-sided counters for the two sides of each aircraft. And where they were squadrons I needed a second aircraft! Now I was looking at hundreds of discrete art pieces instead of a couple of dozen.
Oh yes, it was an art project indeed.
Fortunately, I managed to draft some help in the form of Ian Wedge to help me with around a quarter of the aircraft. It’s a curious quirk of project management that I let Ian do the art of the Italians. He loves all that squiggly camo work and it seemed natural to let him have fun.
So you can see how this whole project ballooned into a labour of love. It’s taken more than a year to finish the masters for all the aircraft and still, at the time of writing, I have the monster task of all the counter layouts to complete. But what you’ll get at the end of all this effort is undoubtedly the prettiest and most intensively arted game in GMT’s inventory.
* This image is taken from Mike Spick’s book Air Battles in Miniature (Patrick Stephens Ltd, 1978).
Author: Lee Brimmicombe-Wood
Look forward to getting this, P500’ed it awhile ago. But I gotta ask, where was this flamewar? Doesn’t appear to be on ConSimworld or BGG…
Let’s not go there. Flame wars are fun but are rarely edifying.
Am definitely going to order Wing Leader, by the way. To your aforementioned critics, I would say “Lee, thank you for your comprehension and appreciation of, as well as devotion to, the intrinsic value of great artwork in a great game- something known to (and loved by) true old grognards like myself; We affectionately refer to this as CHROME.
It seems to me that the character and distinctive markings of the aeroplanes of the first World War would lend themselves nicely to both the tactical and aesthetic concepts of the Wing Leader design… any hope for this in the future?
I’m not sure. Wing Leader is a game of interception, set in an era where interceptors could be controlled from the ground and can respond to the raid that faced them. In World War 1, aircraft flew patrols, which meant their ability to fight was very much determined by the geometry of the situation when they first tallied the enemy. I suspect there would be fewer tactical options in a WW1 game.
Drats! Shot down again! But at any rate, thank you for your consideration and reply, and thanks to you and the folks at GMT for keeping my lifelong hobby alive and well… (But hey, as an incentive to figure this thing out, bear in mind that the Italians were there in the air during the First Show too…reference the Ansaldo SVA, et al…I know, very obscure, but ya can’t fault a guy for tryin’…) Thanks again, Lee
Bear in mind that it’s common in this hobby for people to take a system they like and adapt it to other subjects. If I don’t make a WW1 edition, that doesn’t mean someone else won’t.
Ϻe incliné más Һacia lа muchacha, musitándole lɑs más
dulcxes y a la vez sucias palabras que mе podía inspirar
la magia ddel desseo ʏ del sexo.
Looks great. Can’t wait for this game to be published. Seems to be like the game “London is Burning”, only better because it also includes the US planes, and naval rules! This will become
an instant “classic”. Great work!
There’s nothing wrong with having your game called an art project. Every game should be considered an art project in my opinion. Sure the game play must be there too, but a beautiful design adds so much to the experience, at least it does for me. Good work.
¿Have you seem the beautiful planes of the Spanish Civil War?.
These counters look great. This is going to be one fabulous game! It can’t get here soon enough.
Dear Lee:
I just saw, on the GMT page, the new image of what Wing Leader will look like – my first view since a preliminary image many months ago, and what a difference! Now I’m getting interested in what you’re doing. It looks great.
I still don’t know, but am interested to find out, how you deal with that missing dimension! In Burning Blue, still one of my very favorite games, you gave us a complete plan view and we had to visualize the third dimension – altitude – from the angels counters. In Wing Leader we have altitude and one other dimension, but not what I’ll call, for the sake of argument, ‘azimuth’. I’m looking forward to finding out how – or if – you deal with that.
The best of luck with development – I hope the process goes smoothly toward the finished product.
The simple answer is that we don’t deal with that extra dimension.
Imagine playing The Burning Blue. You have plotted a Luftwaffe raid and on the top-down map the course of the raid is represented as as a line on the map. That line is the plane of the Wing Leader map. In relation to that plane, and to the raid travelling alone that course, all interceptor movement, even that off the line of the raid, becomes some species of pursuit or collision course. Are you in front of the raid or behind it? The third dimension is not needed.
I’m not going to read thru all the comments, but I remember that article that you wrote about in this article (and got you making Wing Leader. Yes, I am that old). And I remember another idea from Airfix – split the model in half (d’uh, build only half) take a air combat photo graph, frame it and put the built half into the photo, making it a sort of 3d effect, As a 14 year old, I got into a lot of trouble from my Dad, when I did that. How was I suppose to know that was his prized photo, lol.
But interesting idea. Interesting enough, I may just order this game, if it is still available. Sadly, game publishers only make it seems around 1000 to 1500 games, then let them go out of print, not to make any more. Thanks Lee
Just was on GMT (I think thats right) and the game I would buy is out of print. When it finally gets re-printed, then I will buy. from 1940 to 1942 is my favorite air time. Any thoughts on a Korean war variant?
Love your artwork. Any chance of making a custom set of AC counters twice the size, to show them off more?