B-17 Board Game

This is a solitaire game, with a two-player variant. The designer's notes state that this game seeks to recreate the experiences of a single B-17 bomber crew during a 25-mission campaign (if the crew or plane last that long), and this game does an admirable job of doing so.Some of the less favorable reviews on this site point out that there is little player choice in the game - this is true. The only choices the player really makes involves where to direct fire from which guns. But I would submit that the point of the game isn't choice as much as it is creating an ongoing narrative of what happens to the crew. Players are encouraged to name all of the crew members, and keep minor statistics about them (such as gunners earning "ace" status after five kills). After multiple missions, something of a story has unfolded, and the game's entertainment value comes from watching that story develop - to me, that is what is unique about this game.There are youtube videos that demonstrate B-17 game play, like those posted by Stuka Joe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu6DBUUXJI. Those clips helped me to decide if I wanted to buy the game.As you play with the same crew on the same bomber during several missions, you'll get a sense of how helpless bomber crews probably felt, how nerve-wracking things became as they neared their targets, and the wide range of terrible things that could happen to a bomber or its crew. You'll also learn a great deal about the types of targets B-17s found in which locations, and how difficult it really was for a plane and crew to survive the 25 combat missions needed to be rotated back to the States. The designers did their research.Something I discovered but I didn't read about in other reviews was that this game has a thriving fan base that generates a lot of free, heavily play-tested bonus content, most of which is graphically superior to the originals. There are plenty of free counters, compounded charts and tables in various formats, variants for British Lancaster Bombers leaving from England, and expansions covering allied bomb runs launched from Libya and Sicily, as well as the appearance of additional fighter and bomber aircraft (including the jet fighters fielded by the Germans at war's end). If you find the game entertaining, you'll have no shortage of material. That extra material is also a plus if you buy a used copy and find that you are missing counters or tables - the fan base has redesigned or reformatted and/or cleaned up everything, and their versions of everything but the rulebook are available for free download. These people even designed counters that didn't come with the game, but make it play more easily.Hopefully, the preceding text paints a clear picture of what the game is; it's also important to talk about what it isn't. Even though B-17 goes into as much detail about individual soldiers as many squad-level tactical wargames, people expecting to control the tactics will be sorely disappointed (check with the folks who only gave it a couple of stars). This is not a tactical wargame. But if you are looking for a game with a wargame feel that really isn't rules-heavy, or if you have an itch to play a wargame but find yourself short on opponents, it is well worth the trouble to obtaining a copy. There is a reason why used copies of this game are selling for $100, after all.

"B-17" is AH's solitaire sim of a single B-17 going 25 missions in 1943-the time of deep penetration unescorted air raids into Occupied Europe. At this time, typical aircraft and aircrew losses were approaching 15% at times, making one's chances of surviving until that 25th mission slim indeed. The game does a competent job of demonstrating this and other realities of bomber operations. It's this demonstration that in my mind ultimately dooms the game to remain on the shelf after a couple plays: nearly every event is determined randomly, very little decision making involved. Target, formation position, routing, enemy opposition all done by die rolls. While that IS realistic-to the average crew these were factors they had no control over, it doesn't make much of a game in this medium. What decision making there is is artificial-the aircraft commander (presumably the player) did not allocate which guns shot at which target. His job was to literally fly the plane, maintaining formation and situational-awareness about the threat, and friendly aircraft. The gunners themselves normally decided which targets to engage. "Realistic" decision making does happen as the crew sustains casualties. The player must move around his crew to cover empty gun positions. Enemy reaction is also by die roll, as is target obscuration, and bombing accuracy (modified by your bombardiers experience). All in all, this game is typical of the paper-and-cardboard "simulators" developed in the 1970s-80s. For its time it was probably adequate, but even when released, computer simulations were already entering the market. This game suffers from a bad choice of topic. WW2 bomber crews WERE basically subject to random events that they could not reasonably influence. But, what makes wargames/sims enjoyable is seeing and reacting to the results of the player's decisions, not simply acting as a random-events-generator. Which the paper-and-cardboard medium at the bottom line, forces one to be. As you may have guessed, I believe this is properly subject for a computer simulation. Players interested in this subject matter would be best served by purchasing one of the several excellent WW2 air combat simulators on the market.