Michael’s thorough and detailed look inside of Decision Games’ RAF gives you everything you need to decide if this excellent air combat game should be gracing your tabletop.

Michael Eckenfels, 10 January 2014

Designer: John Butterfield and Publisher: Decision Games

as always, click images to enlarge

While I am quite a World War II geek, I’m not much into the airpower aspects of it. Most of my interest in that regard is with the bombing campaigns (and with it, games like B-17 Queen of the Skies); indeed, I’m more taken in with tactical and strategic ground combat and the games that focus on that arena. That said, the Battle of Britain has always fascinated me as a true ‘turning point’ campaign that had so many fulcrums and angles that it wasn’t really a foregone conclusion that the RAF would have pulled off a victory.

It was with great anticipation that, back in the late 80s, I found the first edition of RAF on my favorite hobby shop’s shelves. Solitaire games were big for me as it was hard back then to find opponents, and gaming fixes were sometimes few and far between. I was initially a little disappointed that I could only control the RAF in battle and not the Luftwaffe, but the game itself was solid, always different and therefore highly replayable, and even better, had quite a bit of tension to it.

I grabbed my copy of the second edition of RAF late this past summer and have been playing with it as often as I can in a chaotic house with a middle-schooler and a high-schooler and a wife who’s not all that big into games. No cats, fortunately.

Overview

RAF: The Battle of Britain 1940 is a simulation of the trying days of 1940 when the Luftwaffe sought to wipe the RAF from the skies of southern England, in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of England itself. In the original first edition, you could only play the RAF, as I mentioned above; however, in this second edition, not only can you run the RAF solo, but also the Germans solo, or even play a two-player game. All the angles are covered here, and the added ability to run the German campaign solitaire seems to make for a hit-in-the-making. Of course, one must first open the box and see which way their initial impressions will run…

Out of the Box

Initial impressions were highly favorable when I opened my copy. The counters are nice and thick, with clearly-delineated information; these counters are much easier on the eyes, actually, than the old white silhouette from the older version. Unfortunately, these nice counters are almost impossible to separate cleanly and require trimming to do so, which is a major pain in the tail section. Perhaps it is simply my OCD, but I believe that counters must be clean and have sharply-defined edges – no rabbit bushy tails sticking out from the corners, thank you.

The cards are very nice as well, but I’m not sure they’re an improvement on the old version. While the older version was no-frills and was pretty much print on a card, they were legible and easy to read. The Second Edition’s cards are busy, with lots of background to decorate them. The fonts are similar, in that they’re sans serif, large, and sharp, but these new cards might be difficult to read for some people on a few of the cards.