Ace of Aces

Putting you in the pilot's seat

I remember being dragged to hobby craft shops (like Michaels or Joann’s or Hobby Lobby) as a kid. Mom would go looking for yarn or crafts or wicker baskets or … well, it was a mystery to 8 year old me. But at some point they started carrying Dungeons and Dragons¹; soon afterwards other games joined a growing section. Over the course of a year or two the craft shop went from “a place I was dragged to” to “a place I was dragged out of.”

At some point little books appeared on the shelves showing not dungeons or dragons, but World War I biplanes dogfighting.

Ace of Aces, 1st Edition Cover. Photo by Gameshop

Alfred Leonardi’s Ace of Aces didn’t have a board or hex map, just two books (one for each aircraft). If you opened your book to the starting page, you saw what the pilot would see and had a number of maneuvers you could pick from: ‘go straight,’ ‘u-turn,’ ‘bank left,’ and more complex ones like ‘bank left for a bit then turn hard right.’ Each maneuver had a number.

Once both players had selected their maneuver, they called out the page number below. You turned to the page your opponent called out, then looked at the page number listed under the option you picked. If everyone follows instructions correctly, then both players should be on the same page of their respective books, showing the new position!

The Back Cover of the Greysea (1999) edition, with sample pages. (Photo by Justin Gregory)

This game could be done with hex and counters … Ace of Aces battles could be played via the 1973 game Richthofen’s War among others². But those games require tables and have dice and sheets and counters. Yes, they also allow players to deal with altitude, fuel, ammo and other traits, but they lack Ace of Aces’ simplicity: Win the maneuvering battle, win the fight.³

Ace of Aces spawned a genre. A few years later those craft stores started carrying Lost Worlds books: now instead of aerial combat it was swords-and-shields gladiatorial combat.

Which at least made sense to put next to D&D. Photo by Wikipedia

Apparently many other future gamers were also dragged into hobby shops as a child, because Ace of Aces (and the Lost Worlds) games kept getting picked up by new publishers, new kick starters, and showing up on eBay and other sites, with another attempted revival last year. Some of it is nostalgia; to be sure, but there’s something to be said for a game you can play around a camp fire; a game that can be understood almost instantly, intuitively.

“Here’s what you see, what do you do?” All the tedious rules are handled by the book.

The fact that the book does handle them? Seems like magic. Now a days you can have computers handle this for any genre, any level of fidelity you might prefer: from arcade and simple all the way to “physics engine handling everything from wind shear to cloud cover.” Leonardi did his programming on paper. In in a book.

All of which is to say that the Ace of Aces books are a strong candidate for “Most Influential Games of the 20th Century.”

1. Already mentioned by this project.

2. I believe the movement choices line up almost perfectly with Richthofen’s War and/or the later Blue Max, but I no longer have copies to verify.

3. Ace of Aces does have advanced rules to add some of these aspects.