1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that 'I try to avoid buying wargames because I never seem to actually play them'. It took me nearly 16 years, but over the end-of-year break I finally got around to having a crack at 1BoB! My rather thin reasoning was that I should be writing the 1917 chapter of Home Fires Burning later this year, so playing it out as a game might give me some insight into the operational dynamics of the Gotha raids. I mean, it could also be fun, that's a sufficient reason too, I guess?
I won't go too much into the game itself here; the 1BoB page at BoardGameGeek has reviews and discussions as well as images of the game components, if you'd like a better idea of what it's actually like to play. It was fun (even played solitaire), and there's a lot I appreciate as a historian of the raids about the design of 1BoB and the thinking behind it. For example, morale (both civilian and military) is a key concept: the accumulation of morale points (MP) is important for determining victory, but also for enabling the expansion of forces and infrastructure. (If London gets a big raid, that's good for Germany's chance of winning the game, but it also allows the British to build up its air defences in response to public outrage.) Both sides start out with relatively minimal forces, but they can be expanded in a number of directions according to different strategic choices. (Civil defence and early warning are both modelled, along with air units and AA. Or the British player can build up a bomber force in Flanders and try a counterforce strategy - they can even bring an aircraft carrier into operation, if they want to try and Tondern the German aerodromes.) Aircraft are rated for speed, pursuit, combat, bombardment/strafing and endurance ability; the map extends from Aldershot to Ghent. So a lot of research and thought has gone into 1BoB. (The accompanying article – it's a game-in-a-magazine – lists Cole and Cheesman, Fredette, and Morris, among its sources.) This is almost the only game to model the Gotha raids; luckily it's a pretty good one.1
However! As I began to play (as documented in a very messy Bluesky thread), I did come across rules and gameplay which were at variance with my understanding of how the air war over Britain unfolded in 1917 and 1918. So I started thinking about how 1BoB could be adapted to make it more historically, and soon I had a bunch of rule modifications that I'm, rather arrogantly, calling 1BoB+. I mainly used game mechanics and concepts which are already in the game, and I tried to avoid making the game unplayable. But I haven't tested it extensively (or much at all...), and it's very unlikely unbalanced now. Nevertheless, here are the notes explaining my suggested changes. The changes themselves are in a separate PDF (see the link at the bottom of the post). Caveat emptor and all that. They won't make much sense without a copy of 1BoB itself, but the rules are online if you're interesting in digging into that level of detail.
First, though, while my comments below are often framed as criticisms of 1BoB, one thing I learned in this process is that game design is actually very hard! It's one thing to come up with a 'more historical' rule; it's another thing altogether to figure out how that change interacts with the other rules, let alone how it affects gameplay. I continually dithered over to whether to make this change or that change, decisively deciding one way before completely changing my mind a few minutes later. (In fact, I've kept tinkering with 1BoB+ even while writing this post…) And I had the advantage of having something to work with – creating a whole game from scratch would be far harder! More philosophically, I had to think about whether I wanted to merely allow historical behaviour or outcomes, or encourage them, or actually enforce them. It turns out that sometimes one approach is best, while sometimes another provides a better balance. One example is fighter escorts. 1BoB allows fighters to accompany bomber groups; if I've done my sums right, the Albatros D.1s in the game can (just) escort all the way to Woolwich on the eastern edge of London. The Germans absolutely did not use fighter escorts over Britain during the First World War. So should I ban this somehow? Well, in terms of contemporary capabilities, it does seem that it was technically possible, even allowing a fuel margin for combat. So why didn't it happen? James Kightly rightly warned that we shouldn't project backwards what we think was obvious based on later experience; Dreadnought Holiday pointed to problems in coordinating fighters and bombers flying together over a long distance, especially given the lack of W/T. I'd agree with both, but I also note that in game terms, a D.1 is no better in defensive air-to-air combat than a Gotha (though it is slightly superior to a Giant); and there is a limit to how many aircraft can be stacked together. So the German player can include fighter escorts if they want, but it would only provide a marginal increase in combat survivability, and would come at a substantial drop in bombardment power. It's up to them which way they want to go. Details aside, this allows and even encourages historical behaviour, but it doesn't enforce it. It allows experimentation and deviation from what did happen which, after all, is part of the point of turning a war into a game. Props to Joseph Miranda for a fundamentally solid design!
...continue reading- The only other one I know of is an expansion for Luftschiff, which I also have; but it's more of a mission simulator than an operational or strategic game. [↩]
