Tag Archives: wargaming

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.

The Appeal* of Solo Wargames

(* for me)

The Girl and I took the past week off work for our anniversary. We did some old married couple stuff and some maintenance, but a lot of the week was spent in our respective monotropic foci. For her, that was a lot of editing and gap-filling on her current fiction project. For me, it was entirely too much time spent playing, deconstructing, and sketching out house rules for Eagle Leader.

I’ve spent the past few posts braindumping on that game, and as I was wandering around the house today, I found myself considering just why it’s so compelling. It’s easy for me to lose myself in PC games, particularly turn-based tactical stuff (looking at you, X-Com and Doorkickers series), but what’s so fascinating about analog solo wargames? They’re not nearly as cost-effective or space-efficient – for what I’ve spent on Eagle Leader, I could make an immense dent in my Steam wishlist, and that wouldn’t require any shelf space.

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In Which I Wax Rhapsodic About Eagle Leader

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.

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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.

Launch the Alert-Five Hornets

I’ve been wanting to get Hornet Leader out again, having yet to finish a campaign of it. In lieu of actually, you know, playing the damn thing, I spent a few hours today coding some JQuery to generate a random squadron, as per the optional rule for doing just that sort of thing.

I have a few other thoughts on tools for DVG’s other solo wargames, so the new landing page (which links the aforementioned Hornet Leader generator) is here.

Spruance Leader

A couple of years ago, I backed the Kickstarter for Dan Verssen Games’ Spruance Leader (I’m linking to the Boardgame Geek page rather than DVG’s product page because the company… um… doesn’t have the greatest web site). We promptly adopted a pair of kittens, which are not really compatible with big boardgames that need to stay set up for days for protracted campaign play. Between that and mental health haze, the game’s been sitting around unopened for the year and a half since the Kickstarter delivered.

I’m currently living alone while the girl and the cats and I work through the phases of our cross-country move, and I had the foresight to bring my DVG solo games along with me. After watching a couple of actual-play videos, I broke out Spruance Leader this afternoon and set up a first campaign and mission.

Things were getting hot in the North Atlantic. My task force’s first assignment was to go after a Soviet ASW task force operating off the Norwegian coast between Ålesund and Bødo:

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WIP IX

On the workbench this week: a batch of samurai from the Clan War starter box (anyone else remember AEG’s twenty-plus-years-ago attempt at a wargame?). These guys and their friends are getting done up as a collection of scruffy ronin for a friend’s Legend of the Five Rings tabletop campaign:

Once again, Army Painter Speedpaints FTW. Despite rattling around in a box for a couple of decades, the sculpts are still crisp enough that the texture on the armor really pops when the self-shading compounds do their thing.

I’m trying to decide if I want to try to do eyes and risk fucking up the whole face.

WIP VIII

On the workbench: a few more BattleMechs from the boxed set and a couple of Salvage Boxes. I’ve been continuing to use Speedpaints on these because of the ease use, but they may be a bit too large for the intended use of those paints. Large flat armor panels tend not to have a lot of detail to draw in the pigment, so the result is a bit lackluster at times.

Battlemaster in something that’s only camo in very odd biomes. It doesn’t show well here, but I gave this one a three-color red gradient from front to back.
Mongoose with a slightly more obvious gradient. The plan for this one is to try to freehand a starscape on the darker upper half (and hope I don’t screw up something which, at the moment, looks halfway decent).
Marauder II in an attempt at Berlin Brigade camouflage. This one’s likely to need a lot of detail work despite using Speedpaints for the primary coat.