Undaunted: Battle of Britain is a blast for airplane nerds and those who love them

polygon.com:

In video gaming circles, combat flight simulation tends to be an exclusively first-person affair. Developers have been fixated for decades on putting regular folks into the cockpits of historical aircraft and setting them loose, whether it be inside a World War I-era Sopwith Camel or a modern-day F/A-18. The same can be said of dogfighting board games such as Wings of War, Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game, and even Games Workshop’s spinoff Aeronautica Imperialis.

Undaunted: Battle of Britain, the latest board game from Osprey Games, is going in a different direction. It manages to simulate much of the nitty-gritty technical detail of aerial combat in World War II, but it may be a bit hard to parse for those without deeper knowledge of WWII.

In Battle of Britain, designers David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin are applying their award-winning Undaunted mechanics to the climactic air war between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe. There are two key components that make it different from other wargames. First, it’s a deck-building game, meaning that players must take strategic control over what cards they gather into their personal decks. Individual cards represent a singular unit on the battlefield — in this case, an airplane. Each card serves multiple purposes, representing both the way a unit is activated and that unit’s hit points. Therefore, gathering more cards from a given unit to your deck makes those units more robust and more capable on the battlefield.

Battle of Britain adds another wrinkle to that winning formula, however. That’s because airborne units must stay close together — within one hex — in order to retain their most powerful and synergistic abilities. The rulebook notes that this is to simulate the