Because of poor impulse control and a strong interest in late Cold War (i.e., my formative years) NATO air operations, I wound up snagging the full run of Eagle Leader from Atomic Empire and The Tabletop Strategist (good vendors, BTW; will doubtless give both them more money soon, especially before TTS’ current moving sale ends on Friday). Despite Dan Verssen Games’ long-standing and justly-deserved rep for crappy editing and questionable playtesting being fully borne out with this product, I have been having a ridiculous amount of fun.

A small amount of that is the fact that this is a physical product. Analog gaming feels innately healthier than my default mode of digitally-mediated work and play. It gets me away from screens and requires my brain to manipulate things in meatspace, something I’m realizing I need badly. With our recent rearrangement of furniture, it also gives me another reason to spend time in our now-much-more-welcoming library – either alone, or engaged in parallel play while The Girl is working on Lego kits or writing on her laptop.

The greater part of Eagle Leader‘s appeal, though, is its existence in my sweet spot of complexity (fiddly bits! options!) and speed of play, combined with the sort of emergent narrative I first encountered – and latched onto – in the original X-Com. This extends to the other Leader-series games in my library (currently more Cold War – Thunderbolt/Apache Leader, Spruance Leader, and Hornet Leader, with the Vietnam-era Huey Leader in my Kickstarter fulfillment queue). When my little dudes are individual pilots with names and callsigns, or named warships, with varying stress levels and damage and experience and improvement over time, it’s easy to get attached, and to start writing stories in my head.

I didn’t set out to write a full review of Eagle Leader, and this isn’t really going to evolve into one (categorization of the post notwithstanding), but I do occasionally like to share my gaming enthusiasms with my three loyal readers. The Leader series occupies an interesting niche in solo wargaming – which is itself an interesting niche in the broader wargaming hobby. Every Leader game is designed expressly for solo play, and opposition behavior is generally simple and algorithmic on a low-fidelity battlefield. I recently saw one of Eagle Leader‘s designers state that Leader games are more about resource management than tactics, and I can’t disagree with that. But I like that kind of gameplay, when I have the time and focus for it. In Eagle Leader‘s case, that can look like spending more time planning a mission – selecting pilots and airframes, equipping ordnance, figuring out the best ingress route to the target that will enable me to blow a path through the defenses while minimizing exposure – than actually flying that mission. All of which is to say that this is a game that caters very nicely to my particular neurology and the things that bring it pleasure.

I can’t take a damn thing away from Hornet Leader, Eagle Leader‘s direct ancestor. Where the Air Leader sub-line is concerned, Eagle Leader feels more evolutionary than revolutionary – a v1.1 or v1.2 shift in the rules, if you will, rather than a v2. Veterans of the older game will be able to pick this one up with little issue (though they should still read the rulebook [link to PDF] carefully for changes and nuances). But this game introduces some new twists (such as squadron assets – purchasable single-use support options like an MLRS bombardment to soften up the target, or PJs on call to rescue downed aircrew) that hang more narrative and mechanical depth on what was already an excellent framework. I’m also very much looking forward to giving a thorough workout to the new electronic warfare rules attached to the EF-111, as the previous game’s handling of the EA-6B always felt a bit lackluster to me.

The word “narrative” keeps coming up in this post, and for good reason. Left to my own devices, I’ll wander off from a great many things. However, I have gaming/friends circles scattered across a few different Discord servers, and I’ve found myself getting good mileage out of what’s been termed “social solo” play – wargaming alone, but documenting it for an audience, sometimes with their active participation. With Eagle Leader, I started with the included teaching campaign of Red Flag 1992, playing through four days in Nevada with a simplified, semi-scripted problem set. Having gotten my feet under me with that, I’m now between the first and second days of a full-on war in Europe based on Able Archer 83 going sideways in the second-worst possible way. I’m letting my audience weigh in on the mission planning, and it’s turning out to be a really fun experiment in cooperative play.

Lest I seem uncharacteristically bubbly, make no mistake – Eagle Leader has its issues. The first hurdle is the price. I’d be willing to pay full retail to support a brick and mortar game store, but I’ve never walked into a shop that carried DVG products, so I’ve contented myself with ordering from online retailers who offer it for quite a bit less than MSRP. I don’t think the price is unjustified, given the number of physical components in the box and the impact the past few years have had on printing costs, but… don’t pay retail, kids.

(Also, speaking of the components… be prepared for a lot of sorting counters, and have a compartmentalized storage system available. The sheer number of different aircraft, weapon systems, and other trackables will be daunting to those who quail at the thought of developing and maintaining taxonomy. These bead storage boxes from Michaels are invaluable.)

The greater issue may be the game’s proofreading and playtesting – or lack thereof. Despite being two years late from its original Kickstarter date, Eagle Leader is rife with omissions, editing oversights, and other issues that really should have been caught by a functional QA process – but, as noted, DVG’s reputation does not include QA in any meaningful form. I’m thankful that I’m not a new player, and that I’m a lurker on boardgamegeek.com’s forum for the game. That’s enabled me to catch a couple of threads regarding errata and clarifications, and the info gleaned from those has greatly eased my entry. To their credit, the designers have been fairly responsive in compiling an errata and clarifications document (login required to download)… but as someone who’s freelanced in an adjacent space for a number of years, have to say I find it professionally offensive that the game went to print in this state. Nothing so far is in the “literally unplayable” category, but some items have come close for anyone for whom this is a first Leader game.

Having said all of that… I don’t regret any of the purchase, and I expect to get a ridiculous amount of play time out of this thing. It’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes, but if yours align with mine, I’d recommend giving Eagle Leader a shot. At under MSRP, of course.