Airfight

Long time ago (almost 20 years!), when I was a brilliant young lad who still knew pretty much everything and was consequently tremendously bored sitting through the classes, I invented a simple pen-and-paper game to play with my friends.

Airfight (Samoloty) is a turn-based WWI / WWII airplane duelling game that can be played with only a piece of paper, a pen or two and any straight-edge implement. It greatly resembles the way that miniature battle games are played nowadays, but I haven't yet heard of any of them when I first made it up.

Was the game, fun, playable and addictive? Well, let me just say that it had easily been more attractive than the long and interesting hours of religious studies! I also managed to get a couple of people to play it, so it couldn't have been half bad ;)

Let me quickly take you through how the game was played (as far as I can recall the rules).

Fig. 1. I also made a PC implementation - more on that below.

THE RULES

The purpose of the game is to win an airplane duel. Each player controls one of the airplanes and they act in alternating turns. The fight is won when the opponent's aircraft crashes or its pilots are killed. You can force the crashing of the plane by destroying it with your guns directly, damaging it so it loses all its fuel, engine power or steering. When the steering is destroyed, the plane will often crash on the page's border.

The game was meant to be very simple and require little in the way of accessories to play it. As a consequence, some of the rules (like hit zones and the turning radius) are quite arbitrary. Perhaps they could be improved somehow?

Setup

To play the game you need: a piece of paper (usually A5, but any larger size is also alright), a pen (two if you do mind sharing) and any straight edge implement (a ruler is good). Each player draws his airplane doll and picks a starting position on the opposite sides of the page. The typical setup looks like this:

Fig. 2. Game setup.

Airplane systems

The airplane doll is used to track the damage done to the aircraft and the amount of remaining fuel and ammo. The game uses a clever (even if I say so myself!) mechanic to establish the hit zones with damage to different systems affecting the performance of the plane in different areas. The plane doll looks like this:

Fig. 3. Airplane doll.

The round circles indicate the damage done / remaining hit points of the system. An empty circle is 3 HP (or 0 damage), while a completely shaded circle is 0 HP (or: completely destroyed). Some systems have more than one circle to represent its health.

Fig. 4. Representing hit points / damage. Top row illustrates a typical system. Bottom row illustrates the damage to the engine block.

The systems of the aircraft are:

• Propeller, which is used to move the aircraft forward. The propeller is fragile (3 HP) but it is a relatively small target. When the propeller is completely destroyed, the airplane loses 1 speed per turn. When the plane loses all its speed it  crashes.
• Engine. The engine provides power to the aircraft. Each turn you can only move the plane by as many squares as the engine HP left (which is 6 squares at the beginning). When the engine is destroyed, the plane crashes.
• Oil (coolant). This serves as a shield to the engine. Typically, the enemy bullets would first damage the coolant, only to be able to hit the engine after no oil is left. After the oil reservoir is first hit, it springs a leak, and from that point on it loses 1 HP/turn. While the leak is going, the aircraft leaves a dense smoke trail. (Optional: after the oil is all gone, the engine loses 1 HP/turn as well.) There are 4 circles for the coolant, and so the system packs 12 HP.
• Crew. The crew resides in the cockpit in the very center of the craft. It would rarely get hit (you have to be very persuasive as the determination of hit zones is quite arbitrary!), but once the pilot dies, the player loses. The crew has 6 HP.
• Guns/ammo. The plane has two guns, each with it's own supply of ammo (4 circles per gun, or 12 HP - or shots). Each shot taken with a gun reduces the supply by 1 HP. Any hits to the ammo zone also reduce the amount of shots left appropriately.
• Fuel. The fuel forms the biggest hit zone. Each turn you lose 1 HP of fuel for movement. Each hit to the tank also destroys the fuel left by appropriate amount. When the tank is struck, a leak forms, which then empties the reservoir at the rate of 1 HP per turn. Once the fuel is fully depleted, the plane starts to lose 1 speed per turn, and when it reaches 0 it crashes. The plane with a leaking tank leaves a trail of smoke. Each plane starts with 18 HP worth of fuel, but you can customize that amount.
• Left/right steering. This is split left to right and into the tail/wing assemblies. Each side has 6 HP. The damage to the steering surfaces affects the controllability of the craft (more on this in the following section).

Flying

During your turn you can execute two actions, one after another: moving and shooting. I think in the original game it was always 'move first, then shoot', but I see no reason why the sequence of the actions can't be picked by the player.

There are two parts to the movement: speed and turning radius. The first is controlled by the remaining engine HP left, in that you can only move as many squares as the engine HP left. You can move on any sort of curve and it's the length of that curve that counts. You have to do your best to approximate the distance.

Fig. 5. Flying the plane with various levels of speed.

The turning radius decides on the maneuverability of the plane. You have two sets of steering controls, each of which can be damaged or destroyed and you can only turn left/right as much as the remaining health of the system lets you. This is still pretty much arbitrary (modern figure games use curve shaped accessories to determine the turning radius rigorously), but you'd have to do your best to fly your plane true to its current capabilities. For instance, with the right side rudders completely destroyed, you shouldn't be able to turn right at all!

You have 6 HP for the steering on each side (12 HP in total). The turning radius could be scaled with the current HP to total HP ratio using this picture for reference:

Fig. 6. Turning radius related to the steering HP left.

Shooting

When you choose to shoot, you can use each of your guns once. There is an arcade aspect to this mechanic. You place a dot 1 square away from where the gun is on your plane avatar (it's either left or right bottom corner of the triangle) and use the ruler to draw a straight line through those two points. You can only shoot vaguely in 90 degree sector facing front of your plane.

Fig. 7. Shooting the target.

A hit is scored when the line crosses the enemy's avatar. You have to use the plane doll to approximate where on the enemy craft the hit has occured and process the damage accordingly:

Fig. 8. Finding out where the damage occured.

There is a social aspect to this, as the hit zone assingment is quite arbitrary. Arguing is allowed, provided you do it in a civilized way. Maybe a good way to keep it fair would be that both you and your opponent each decide on the hit zone and then you use a coin toss to pick one?

Each hit takes out 1 HP of the affected system, but you can use a damage multiplier (e.g. 2x) if you wish for a shorter game.

Sample game

Ok, let's try with a sample game!

Fig. 9. Player at the bottom wins. The plane on the top crashes due to the lack of fuel and due to oil leak destroying the engine.

I found my old notebook in which I apparently play-tested the game:

Fig. 10. Old game of  Samoloty.

AIRFIGHT ON A PC

Much, much later (but still like ~10 years ago), I made a computer implementation of the game.

It was done in C++ and used the Allegro library (http://liballeg.org/) for graphics and control. I used soe of the graphics I found on the web for the planes and the backgrounds and to my eternal shame I didn't record the authors (if you know them, please let me know).

The game is available on my GitHub HERE. Binaries are included, so all you have to do is to download the game and play.

Fig. 11. Game menu.

Features

• Two-player split-screen real-time shooting match!
• Several aircraft to choose from (Spitfire, Bf110, Flying Fortress and F16),
• Different types of weapons (machine guns, flak cannons, rockets, self-aiming guns, bombs),
• Hit zones,
• Very primitive artifical "intelligence".

Installation

As mentioned above, simply go to my GitHub repository and download the game. The binaries for Windows are included. If you wish, you can build the game from the source. A Code::Blocks project for the Windows version is included, and a Linux Makefile is also available.

For the Linux version, you will have to install the Allegro library package (version 4.2).

Playing the game

Select your starting craft and start a new game! If you wish to play with another person, you should first disable a primitive form of artificial intelligence enabled by default for the second plane. Go to the Options and switch off the Test2 checkbox.

The controls are as follows.

Player #1:

• ← → turn the plane left and right,
• ↑ accelerates the plane,
• ↓ switches the boost on and off (the boost briefly multiplies your speed),
• Right Shift cycles between the weapons,
• Right Control fires the guns.

Player #2:

• Z C turn the plane left and right,
• X accelerates the plane,
• A switches the boost on and off (the boost briefly multiplies your speed),
• Left Shift cycles between the weapons,
• Left Control fires the guns.

Just the same as in the pen-and-paper version, your goal is to destroy the opponent's plane. There is a brief warm-up period at the start of the game during which your weapons are locked. Once you achieve a certain speed, your plane 'takes off'. From that point you can't slow down too much, otherwise you'll stall and crash.

There are hit zones here as well. Destroying your engine will make your plane slow down and stall. Fuel may leak, the ammo may get destroyed and the guns may jam. The hit zones are implemented through an underlying sprite map with color encoding:

Fig. 12. Hit zones of the flying fortress.

The bullets each cover some distance between frames and so there is a chance for them to hit even the internal aircraft systems by chance.

Fig. 13. Flying Spitfire.

Fig. 14. Flying Bf110.

The game isn't terribly well balanced. Who knows, maybe I'll make a new version some day.

As to why do the planes seem to fly belly-up in the sky... You won't understand ;)