Here's Post #2 in a series that introduces my home-brew jet combat tabletop game, designed for solo-play. The posts will unfortunately come in slowly due to my work commitments.
Airspeed and Altitude:
Altitude and Airspeed are abstracted in OSAAF to ranges from 0 to 9. As shown in the pictures from this old post, I use home-made polymer cubes to record the current Altitude and Airspeed of each aircraft. Any aircraft with an Altitude of 0 has crashed and is destroyed; therefore the red cube represents Altitude. Although the numbers are abstract, I imagine about a speed of 6 represents Mach 1. Good starting speeds and altitudes are 3 and 3.
Initiative:
After initial set-up is complete and the opposing jets are on the board with Altitude and Airspeed set, it's time to play. Since it's a solo-game, the very first thing to accomplish on every turn is determining the order of decision-making. This is not however the order of decision-execution (i.e. moving/shooting), just the order of making certain energy management decisions (how hard will I bank, do I care more about speed or nose-pointing accuracy, etc.)
The aircraft cards I introduced last post were designed to be drawn as chits for initiative. During play test however I've found simply rolling to determine order works fine.
Once the order is established randomly, then the energy management decisions are made. It's a simple process but it's the core of the game and I haven't had my coffee yet… so that's for next post.
Looking forward to the next post!
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