I felt fortunate this morning, dealing with a head cold and nowhere to go, to be able to dig into a game I had wanted to play as a teen but that I never had access to. Thankfully, included in the massive haul I picked up at Christmas last year was Avalon Hill’s game “B-17: Queen of the Skies” – and it was certainly one of the gems of the lot.

Avalon Hill purchased “B-17” from another company and tinkered with it, producing their first version of it in 1981. It quickly developed a following among wargamers- especially those who were aviation-oriented- because it was designed precisely as a solitaire game.

You are in London, England in 1942 or ’43 and become the silent shepherd of a B-17 bomber that participates in daylight bombing raids over German territories. To begin the game, you name your plane and your ten crew members, and then you are off: your plane is sent out on its first of (hopefully) twenty-five missions, early on simply crossing the English Channel to bomb select strategic targets in German-occupied France. As your green crew gains experience flying into enemy airspace and facing combat, your missions become longer and head deeper into German territories, and the odds of every crew member, like the odds of your plane itself , surviving all 25 missions drops a little with each flight.

The genius in this system is that Avalon Hill did not make game processing too overwhelming to play, but the game does put your plane into situations that real bombers faced- and you can expect similar results when those situations are resolved mission by mission, round by round, turn by turn.

American planes and crews were lost at high rates in that first year or so that they operated into Europe out of England. The game reminds you of this as you fly to and from your target each mission.

Since the game is new to me, I spent the an hour reading and learning the basic rules, and then I let it guide me through game setup. And what it makes you do is part of what makes it a pretty intimate game. It has you name your plane, and your ten crew members.

What better way is there for me to start to write some “history” than to chronicle the missions of my plane and her men.

For whatever reason, my bird ended up name “Eyes of Abilene”. You could do some good things with a name like that in nose art.

And she and her crew flew a first mission this morning as well. I’ll recap that later. I am very glad to say she and her crew went and came home unscathed.