So I finally managed to get the planes from the Blood Red Skies starter set painted as well as some Soviet Yak fighters and the Soviet Ace pilot. I brought them down to The Sentry Box to run a few demo games. I only managed to get photos of the first game that was played. While the boxed set comes with German and British aircraft I picked up, and painted, a set of Soviet fighters so I could play some Eastern Front scenarios. So the first game had a force of six German BF 109s facing off against seven Yak 1 fighters including an Ace.
Before playing the game one is tempted to try to compare it to Wings of Glory. There are some majors differences between those games that really make comparing them difficult. Blood Red Skies has no preprogrammed movement (Yay!) and does away with elevation levels. In BRS each plane is determined to be at a particular advantage level (Advantage, Neutral and Disadvantaged) relative to the other planes in the combat and this determines who can fire as well as models the effects of diving to gain movement by gaining or removing advantage from planes. If you want to expend effort to move faster or manoeuvre your plane more than normal you have to trade this off by forgoing advantage. Activation is also done based on advantage and pilot quality so gaining movement in one turn means that you will activate later in the next turn.
Wings of Glory also focuses on downing enemy plans. There are damage decks and effects are placed on planes that can hinder the ability of a plane to fight or perform maneouvres. In Blood Red Skies planes can certainly be shot down (but almost always only when they are Disadvantaged) but the main effort of the game is to place your opponent at disadvantage and to break the morale of the squadron and force them from the air.
In the first game that we played today the Soviet forces won the day but only downed a single German aircraft. Every time you fire at an opponent and hit one of their planes then they get a blast marker. Once they have as many or more of those than they have planes left on the table they break and the game is over. So you can pepper an opponent with fire and still cause them to flee the battle without causing a single loss.
This makes your positioning and manoeuvring very important. You are also rewarded, in game terms, for using your planes in combination with one another to either outmanoeuvre your opponents or to act as wingmen to guard other planes that are attempting to line up shots. Blood Red Skies is meant to model larger air battles so this makes sense. The only German casualty in our first game was caused by one aircraft using its action to cause the German pilot to lose a level of advantage, taking it to Disadvantaged, and then having a second pilot fire, cause a hit and bring it down. On its own the single plane wouldn’t have been able to do this.
The game seems to involve a lot more strategy and planning than I would have originally thought and it is an nice to see that this is accomplished without a lot of chrome in the rules. The rulebook doesn’t have the best set of rules. They aren’t badly written but the material in them seems a touch disorganized. Once you set everything up and play through a few activations it all seems pretty straightforward though. Everything you need to refer to is on a single page of the BRS reference sheet and we didn’t need to refer to it after the first few activations.
The starter set comes with six Spitfire and six BF 109 fighters. The models are okay. They don’t have a lot of detail but what they do have is, for the most part, quite crisp. Painting them was a bit of a learning process for me. While there are clear details on the models they are not deep enough to draw in a traditional wash. I also had some problems painting the frame of the cockpits. My normal practice of thinning out my paint lead to the glass areas of the cockpit filling in with paint and so I had to revert to using paint direct from the bottle to make sure that it wasn’t going to be too wet.
Despite those issues I was satisfied with the models. My only real issue is that the Yak fighters come with a card that allows you to add two more Yak aircraft to a game. Sadly they are sold in boxes of six so you either need to have smaller Axis forces and use your six aircraft or spring for another box of planes.
Blood Red Skies is a far more subtle game than I was expecting and I am certainly looking forward to playing it again and trying out some new strategies.
Pile of dice 
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