Tag Archives: Fulcrum Leader

Head to Head Engagement: Eagle Leader vs. Fulcrum Leader

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been playing – and thoroughly enjoying – Eagle Leader. I recently picked up its sibling, Fulcrum Leader, and am currently playing through my first campaign. These are collectively the newest additions to Dan Verssen Games’ Leader series of solo wargames (more specifically, of the Air Leader sub-branch, which originated with Hornet Leader). I won’t say too much more about the games’ shared ancestry here because there is plenty of content elsenet, and this is neither advertisement nor review (despite me dumping this in the Reviews category for ease of later return).

So whatthehell am I spending electrons on, then?

My intent with this post is to illustrate the points of congruence and divergence between the two games – beyond the “well, duh” obvious of NATO versus Warsaw Pact player-avatar perspective. Basically, I’m putting together the kind of information that I wish I’d had when I was considering whether to buy one or both, because it was all too easy to conclude that they’re the same game with different skins. That, I’m happy to report, is in no way the case. While they definitely share the core mechanics and gameplay loop of the Air Leader sub-series, the devil is in the details – and there are a lot of details in which they differ.

The following assumes a baseline level of familiarity with the Leader series, particularly the Air Leader sub-family (Hornet Leader, Phantom Leader, Israeli Air Force Leader, Corsair Leader, Zero Leader…).

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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.