Flame wars, don’cha love ‘em? Gets the blood up. Keeps me alive and truckin’. This post begins with one of those online feuds in which grown men rhetorically whack each other round the head with saucepans until one side is exhausted or goes completely loopy and starts chewing the walls. In this fight my opponent’s parting shot was to wish me well with my Wing Leader ‘art project’. It was snide diminution of my game and I could cheerfully have lobbed a brick back. But like the best barbs it had hooks of truth. Wing Leader IS an art project. A damned big one. I told myself I might as well own the idea.

The benefit of being an artist-designer is that you can make a game look exactly like you want. There’s no other vision mediating the final experience. But there’s another benefit: the art and the design are intertwined. Sometimes the design is driven by the visual/tactile game experience. Art can inspire the design.

It’s true of my earlier games but it is especially true of Wing Leader.

I make no secret of Wing Leader’s origins. Back in the ‘70s I remember riffling through my brother’s copies of Airfix Magazine and finding rules by Mike Spick for an air combat miniatures wargame. Spick’s concept was ingenious: take plastic aircraft kits and split them in half along the centreline. Then play the game as if looking from the side. A picture says a thousand words so here are some from Spick’s game*.

See? What a wonderful idea. The game instantly communicates that most important of aviation qualities–altitude–and it looks fantastic. I told myself I’d steal that idea and use it one day.

There’s a second origin story for Wing Leader and it begins with a whim. I wanted to play a WW2 game with Italian aircraft in. I’m fond of the Italian air force, and though I’d managed to shoehorn them a guest spot in my Battle of Britain game, The Burning Blue, that was not the best showcase for the Regia Aeronautica. Italian pilots had proven themselves able opponents in other theatres, despite flying aircraft that were underpowered. And they flew such pretty ‘planes too, with lovely lines and jazzy colour schemes. If the Italians had anything, it was a pile of style.

This brought me back to contemplating a game that could really show off the coolness of the Italians. It seemed to me that the side view caught the lines of a Folgore fighter in ways no top-down view could. And I’d been itching to do a side-on game since my teens, to really highlight what altitude brought to an aerial fight.

The design was on.

It seems odd to admit that a design was initiated by strong visuals, by the desire to create aircraft porn. But there you have it. Once I had a framework for the Italians, all sorts of other ‘planes suggested themselves. Spitfires, Zeroes, Mustangs all look their prettiest from the side. The traditional top-down view never captures the essence of a aeroplane but the side elevation communicates their power and their signature lines.

It also shows off the aircraft’s heraldry. Not only badges and shark mouths but also squadron codes and flashes. Just look at these Hurricane counters. The underlying aircraft is the same, but the paint schemes and bold squadron codes make them appear very different.

All of a sudden I found myself with a logistic problem. In other air games I’d been able to produce a small number of aircraft art pieces and clone them as necessary. But cloning was not possible in this game. I had to produce a separate piece of art for 220 aircraft counters! And they had to be double-sided counters for the two sides of each aircraft. And where they were squadrons I needed a second aircraft! Now I was looking at hundreds of discrete art pieces instead of a couple of dozen.

Oh yes, it was an art project indeed.

Fortunately, I managed to draft some help in the form of Ian Wedge to help me with around a quarter of the aircraft. It’s a curious quirk of project management that I let Ian do the art of the Italians. He loves all that squiggly camo work and it seemed natural to let him have fun.

So you can see how this whole project ballooned into a labour of love. It’s taken more than a year to finish the masters for all the aircraft and still, at the time of writing, I have the monster task of all the counter layouts to complete. But what you’ll get at the end of all this effort is undoubtedly the prettiest and most intensively arted game in GMT’s inventory.

* This image is taken from Mike Spick’s book Air Battles in Miniature (Patrick Stephens Ltd, 1978).

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