Category Archives: Projects

Defending the Baltic Approaches

I made a couple of false starts at this release, but I’m now in a place where I can comfortably consider it out the door. After a couple of weekends of unhealthy hyperfocus in GIMP, the end product (for now) of my thoughts on Eagle Leader‘s under-served Luftwaffe is available.

AIRBALTAP, my first fan-made expansion, includes:

  • 16 West German and Danish pilot cards
  • 3 event cards
  • 3 squadron asset cards
  • stats for the West German Alpha Jet light strike fighter and AS.34 Kormoran anti-shipping missile
  • a new campaign, Able Archer Baltic (1983)

The campaign requires the use of the target cards from Expansion 8: JASDF and assumes you have Expansion 1: Luftwaffe and RAF.

It’s currently at a playtest draft version 0.5, which you can download from my main DVG resources page.

Eagle Leader Pilot Builder Worksheet

One of my ongoing projects over the past couple of months has been to reverse-engineer the design formula that DVG uses to build and balance pilots for the Air Leader series of games. The first step was to spreadsheet every printed pilot card in the Eagle Leader run, which was a non-trivial but oddly-relaxing data entry project.

Then the analysis started. That was considerably less relaxing.

I still haven’t isolated the formula that DVG actually uses (and I have, at times, had serious doubts that it actually exists, or that they follow their own math if it does exist). But I do have a ~85% solution that I’m considering “good enough for now.”

If you’re one of the 0.3 of my readers who are interested, you can get it on my main DVG resources page.

Alpha Jet Alpha Test

After letting some thoughts on the Luftwaffe in Eagle Leader percolate for a month, I bought a replacement power cable for our flatbed scanner, grabbed some images at 600dpi, and did a little bit of hacking and homebrewing in GIMP.

I don’t know if this’ll go any farther – it’s not like I have a shortage of other creative projects – but I’m pleased with what I was able to accomplish with a few hours of research and tinkering.

Near as I can tell, the fonts DVG used are Gunplay Regular (by Typodermic) for the vertical text (aircraft models, service years, and SO costs), and something really close to Bombardier for everything else.

Composite Squadron II

After having an inordinate amount of fun with Eagle Leader despite its editing and playtesting issues (thank the gods for an active and mostly-helpful boardgamegeek.com community), I broke down and picked up the full run of Fulcrum Leader. Despite some lingering misgivings about playing the default bad guys from my childhood (and, arguably, again from 2014 forward), I’m finding it an equally-enjoyable play experience – and arguably better-designed than its cousin.

As my regular readers may anticipate, I’ve built out a random squadron generator here.

Composite Squadron

I recently acquired a copy of Dan Verssen Games’ long-delayed Eagle Leader solo wargame. I am trying to remain firm in my resolve to not play it until I finish my current North Atlantic WWIII grand campaign of Spruance Leader. However, a four-hour power outage on Saturday did give me some enforced tech-free time, part of which I used to punch out and sort the absolutely ridiculous amount of counters that are typical of DVG Leader-series games.

That, predictably, got me engaged in thinking about the game more, so I sat down that night and spent another three hours branching the code and data set of my earlier Hornet Leader random squadron generator to build one for Eagle Leader. Both are linked from the DVG games landing page of the main site.