Ramblings Over the Front

In an effort to break away from our standard Wright Flight gaming sessions, in which we always start at peg four and no rookies, and rarely aces, I decided to mix things up a bit at the last Wright Flight gathering. To that end we allowed players to choose their starting height, including if they wanted to have climb counters in play, and used the C Deck to determine some random pilot/observer skills/abilities. Each player pulled a card from the deck, and the following parameters were used:

Boom Card - rookie
Card value of zero - no extra abilities
Card value of ten - ace (and player could choose their ace skill)
Any other card value - bullet checker

I feel a few things happen a bit too often within the Wings rules...the amount of jams, particularly for seasoned pilots, boom cards, and of course collisions as outlined in the rules. Our group, like many others, use the house rule of a peg has to overlap the enemy plane stand before a collision takes place. We also state that the boom card only causes half damage, rounded down. For jams, allowing some of the players to have the chance to have the bullet checking skill did help, as we did have a few players who garnered that skill from the random card pull. With six players, and seven card pulls (we had one two seater), we had four bullet checkers and no other skills. One player respawned his Fokker Dr.I and pulled a 10, earning ace status!

We did one other thing...once a player reached one point or more over half damage, they had to make their way to their home edge. That helps to avoid players playing beyond realistic damage. Perhaps an ace could be allowed to ignore that limitation.

Hopefully we will continue to use some random abilities moving forward...for certain we will with the games I help to host!