If you are trying to get into Wild Blue Yonder and you’ve never played a Down in Flames game before, the amount of material in the box can seem daunting. But it is being touted as a logical place for beginners and veterans of the system alike to dig into, so below you’ll find a (somewhat random) collection of hints and tips that hopefully make learning and playing the game easier. For now, we’ll leave the campaigns out of it, though once you are familiar with dogfighting you will probably want to check them out as well.

Sorting and Organization

First of all, you will want to sort your game a bit to make everything easier to find. Especially the airplane cards, since you will need to look through them to find specific planes. Exactly how you do this is up to you; I divided mine out into Axis and Allies, sorted each of these into the different nationalities, sorted each nationality into bombers and fighters, and then organized them by year, keeping wingmen with their relevant aircraft. Then I stacked all the Allied fighters together with the bombers separate, and likewise with the Axis planes. You could conceivably just sort everything by year, instead.

If you use the insert provided with the game to store everything, it would be a good idea to run a wide ribbon or strip of paper underneath the decks of cards so that you can lift them out more easily. You can use the wells under the cards to store some of the counters, especially ones you won’t be needing at first like the pilots.

Notes on the Dogfight Rules

The dogfight rulebook seems over-long for a 15 or 20 minute game. There is an option where you can read some rules and then jump to an extended example of play to learn the game faster. That didn’t work for me, but if it does for you, great!

The thing to keep in mind as you read the rules is that they are covering a ton of different planes and situations. The basics are really not too difficult, and the things you will want to pay special attention to are position, altitude, bursts, wingmen, and card play. The action cards themselves tell you right on the card what they do or what cards they can respond to; looking through a bunch of them should help you get the hang of them pretty quickly.

The rulebook is sadly lacking an index, but there is a table of contents on the front cover that is a little help. There are many rules in there for planes with special advantages or abilities, but below you’ll find some suggestions of some simpler planes to try out first.

A few examples of planes included in Wild Blue Yonder.

Suggested Starter Planes

Here are some pairings of planes that you could use for your first few dogfights. My apologies to historians—I have no idea if these planes would have actually flown against each other; they were simply chosen for their balance and ease of play:

(Note: if you need to brush up on your knowledge of the military insignia for the nationalities in the game, look in the campaign rulebook under rule 19.1.1)

• Soviet I-16 tip 24 ‘Ishak from February 1940 vs. Italian G.50bis “Freccia” from April 1941. These planes are absolutely identical, so each player will have an equal chance of winning.
• German Bf109E from December 1939 vs. British (RAF) Spitfire Mk I/II from August 1938. These planes have identical stats, except that the Spitfire can take one more point of damage.
• Italian Re.2001 from May 1942 vs. British Hurricane Mk I from December 1937.  The Re.2001 has better performance (you can have more cards in your hand), but the Hurricane has better armament.

Once you have tried a few of these combinations you can start picking your own. The numbers in the black hexagon on the right side of the airplane cards are for balance; ideally, the sum of the leader and wingman’s numbers would be the same for both sides.

Dogfighting Strategy Tips

Most of the strategy in a dogfight is preprogrammed in the sense that you have to make do with the cards that you draw. That said, there are a few things you will want to keep in mind.

• Be wary of running too low on cards! For many planes it is difficult to draw back up to the hand limit quickly, so knowing when to stop playing cards is vital.
• Consider starting your planes out at higher altitudes, and dropping down as needed to gain the card draw advantage.
• Trying to climb with a crippled plane can be excruciating, so once damaged you may want to try to fight it out at lower altitudes.
• It might seem obvious, but be sure to make the best use of your response cards. Most of the time if you have two cards that you could use to respond to an attack, you will want to play the card that responds to fewer types of attack/maneuver first. Similarly, in most situations you might not want to respond to a simple Maneuver card with an Ace Pilot. Save it for something better.

Dogfighting is just one part of what Wild Blue Yonder has to offer, but it is also the backbone of the game system. When you are comfortable with it and ready to move on, there is a wealth of additional material in the box.

Author: David Waldorf