#forcomparrisonssake

Turn three: Things get messy.  Huge hodge-podge of imbalanced planes throughout the WWII line of Wings of Glory, right after first contact.

I’ve mentioned I play X-Wing before, but before I got it, I had already jumped into Wings of Glory. The whole choose-then-reveal movement planning was brand new and astounding - and it still is incredibly enthralling to me.  (Even though my great failure in chess was being unable to see opponents’ plans, I still enjoy at least trying to look ahead.)

The big differences are how far you have to plan ahead - three cards at once in Wings WWI, two turns ahead in WWII vs the immediate plan-then-reveal in W-Wing. That, and the cards.

X-Wing uses standard cardboard rulers - 1, 2, 3 turn, 1, 2, 3 bank, 1, 2, 3, and 4 strait. Every ship in the game sticks to some combination of these components, and added green/red moves play on the stress mechanics for further variance.

 Wings of Glory (and earlier Wings of War,) uses cards with printed paths - each plane draws from their own deck, meaning there is incredible variety and subtle tweaks available to every single plane.  If you actually take the time to learn the maneuver decks properly, I’m certain there’s an entire top tier of play simply revolving on optimizing your use of these subtle differences to get just a little bit more inside your opponents’ arc...

The downsides to the cards are pretty sever though - they can’t be sized directly to the length of the maneuver, as that would give away the action to be taken. They’re annoying to pick up and lay down. And, because the bases overlap them, an incredible amount of bumping happens. (Don’t fret the milimeters - just call it “crosswind” and move on.)

The cardboard rulers aren’t perfect either.  While they combine wonderfully with the little notched bases on your ship, you can be certain of your measurements every time. Narry a bump, save when you mess up your piloting.  But, there is a limited number of templates to choose from.  This helps when memorizing and envisioning movesets, but it does mean there is a finite pool of variations to pull from when balancing.  While stress does add some variation back in, this may well be why Fantasy Flight added in such techniques as the Talon Roll and the Segnor Loop - to squeeze a bit more out of those simple templates.

Which is better: Rulers or cards? ...probably the rulers. The precision is just so much of an improvement that you can ignore the nearly-infinite variation cards offer - and you can still get close via clever manipulation of a solid set of templates anyways.

Is there a better system? A nice compromise? Perhaps. But we’ll just have to wait and see on that, eh?

...this was just supposed to be a quick picture upload, and dropped into a multi-paragraph cross-game design comparison. I really need to not post late at night.