Richthofen's War

[kirkh]

OK, so who here started by playing AH's classic Richthofen's War? I'll admit, I did. My friends and I spend countless hours playing one on one games that took only a few minutes apiece. The loser had to randomly pick a new plane while the winner also randomly picked a new plane but had his choice of keeping the new plane or retaining the old one. I remember my friend turning on his 45 of the Royal Guardsmen's "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" and we'd listen while we played. Between games I spent countless hours reading the additional backup material that came with the game. That and the Gene Gurney book Flying Aces of World War I peaked my interest in WWI airplanes, which I've retained to this day.

On an aside, a friend and I have heavily modified RW to add elements such as initiative, tailing, etc. Our revised game has similarities to DP, but retains lots of the fun factor. If anybody's interested in what we did, head over to Web Grognards at
grognard.com/titler.html, scroll down to Richthofen's War and click on either "variant" or "designers notes" Word files.
Our chopped and cut RW is lots of fun.

[gblemings]

I purchased RW, after DP, as i was an avid wargammer, at one time i must have owned all of Avalon Hill games...

I liked the campaign game, and in fact, bought another copy of rw, off ebay, around the same time i picked up several dp games on ebay.

garyb

[kirkh]

Yeah I owned a lot of AH games as well. Then when I graduated college I got rid of them all because I had nobody to play them against. So now I'm in the process of re-acquiring the ones I really enjoyed since they can now be played over the internet with tools such as VASSAL and Cyberboard.

Funny you should mention the RW campaign game. A friend and I had always wanted to try it so about six months ago tried to play it via e-mail. Unfortunately it went so slow we finally gave up because we couldn't see an end in the foreseeable future. I'd still like to try it someday though.

[yoodle]

I just realized last night that I have a copy of Richthofen's War amongst my collection. I think it may be missing some stuff though.

Is this game any good? I vaguely remember playing it a few decades ago and I really disliked it. I seem to remember that the combat always seemed to go back and forth with each side losing a plane until is was down to one plane on each side. Then, it was almost random which one would be killed first. I felt like it was about as interesting as two people rolling die to see who got the higher number.

Are my memories correct? Is this game worth trying out again as an adult, or should I just stick with DP?

[kirkh]

It's basicly an "I move and shoot then you move and shoot" game. It's not very realistic and basically comes down to who has the most guns. My friend and I have modified it a huge amount to add DP like rules which improves it considerably. Those rules can be found over at Web Grognards. The original game may not be great by todays standards but as an introduction to both wargaming and WWI aviation for a 12 year old it was a godsend.