Cost: $15 From: Milton Bradley Players: 2 Playing Time: 45 minutes Type of game: Family Strategy Complexity: 4 Skill level: 4 Reviewed by: Kris Gould, Issue 2.4, Summer 1994
Tactical combat games are not my cup of tea. I admit I like an occasional bout of Richthofen's War, but if you were to give me five hundred die-cut markers with combat numbers in the corners and open out a map of an obscure part of Europe divided into hexagons in front of me, then I would probably react by going downstairs and trying to find someone to join me in a game of Scotland Yard. Or Screaming Eagles.
Milton Bradley's Screaming Eagles can be described as a tactical combat game, but there are no hexes or die-cut counters. The map has no terrain and each player has only two jet fighters to worry about. It plays in under an hour, and the rules can be completely understood by a seven-year-old the first time you teach it to her. Yet this fast-playing, risk-rewarding game has enough interesting strategies and important decisions to keep it ranking among my favorite quick two-player games for the past six or seven years.
The board is a rectangular grid, like a chessboard with a few extra rows and columns, which has been squeezed so that all the squares have become diamond shaped. It is turned so that travelling forward means going along a diagonal from point to point of the diamonds, and a few spaces have been removed from the corners. The jets are very nice plastic models in blue and tan, mounted on clear plastic stands. Each player also has two plane displays in thick cardboard with peg holes for marking damage to the planes, as well as keeping track of ammunition and flares left. There are also two sets of dice: four red dice for determining whether your shots have hit their target, and four black dice for movement and for finding what part of your plane was damaged.
You and your opponent fly side-by-side in the same direction. The jets can only move forward, forward-left, or forward-right. To start each round, both players decide in advance what both of their planes will be doing, and put a card face down for each plane. The cards say whether the jet will be moving forward-left, forward-right, or straight forward, and whether you will roll one, two, or four dice for movement. After all four cards have been played, the first player flips up one card and moves that plane according to the card played. Then the second player decides which of his two planes to move, and flips up that card and moves. Then the first player moves his other plane, and the second player moves his other plane. Then the round is over, and the first player for this round becomes the second player for the next round.
You may fire at another jet either before or after you move, but not both times, and you may only fire at a plane that is in front of you. This makes sneaking up behind your opponent very important, and the board lets you do that by a clever system wherein you go off the far end of the board and loop around to a number-coded space on the near end. The movement dice also reduce the amount of luck involved in estimating where you will end up, because they only have numbers one, two, and three, repeated twice. So if you roll two dice, you know you will be moving between two and six spaces, with the most likely roll being four. There are three ways to fire. Long range missiles roll four dice (These dice have the numbers zero, two, and five, so you can always miss...) and may fire at any plane in its front cone of fire. Medium range missiles are the same, but only roll three dice. Each plane only gets three Medium and two Long range missiles, so use them wisely. You also get eight cannon rounds, and these may be reloaded. However, cannon rounds may only be fired in a straight line forward-left, forward, or forward-right, and only roll two dice. This makes exact positioning much more important. Each plane also gets two flares, which you may use before the dice are rolled when someone is shooting a long or medium range missile at you (but not a cannon round). If you use a flare, then you may remove the highest die after they are rolled, frequently resulting in a miss.
Tactics are fast and tense, as both players loop around, trying to come up right behind the opponent, while avoiding overshooting and finding their plane directly in the enemy's sights. Alternating first player means that you can sometimes move the same jet twice in a row, which can be devastating if you were able to position yourself behind another plane, or it can be a lifesaver if your last maneuver put you right in front of the enemy. Damage is simplistic, but it works well. The most common place to hit is the wing, but it takes four wing hits to shoot down a plane. The most difficult to hit are the fuel tank or the cockpit, but one hit there is all that's needed. It usually takes four or five hits to shoot down a plane, but you can do it in one, so the excitement stays high. There's nothing more satisfying than being in a desperate situation, when one of your planes has been shot down and both of your enemies are shooting at your last plane, and then making that lucky cockpit shot on his undamaged jet to even up the game!
This isn't a very accurate simulation of jet warfare (I've never seen jets do that many loop-the-loops), and gamers who are into realistic battle simulation would turn up their noses instantly. What it is, is a fast, fun, quick, head-to-head game that's easy to get out and start when you've got a half an hour and can't think of anything else to fill the time that wouldn't be a major strain on the cerebrum. Easy without being totally mindless, Screaming Eagles is a nice light filler.