Saturday, February 19, 2011

Axis & Allies in the air.

Apparently there's a new A&A minis line in the works, this one being primarily aerial. On one hand this isn't surprising, because there's already been land- and sea-based versions, but on the other hand I think there are signs that the collectible format has exhausted its welcome in the hobby. I know that I already swore that I wouldn't get into another colelctible game at this point, although I'd stick with the AAM and WAS lines a slong as they lasted.

So I'm not entirely sure I'll bit with the air game. I'm expecting the land game line to end soon, if it hasn't already, although it seems like the naval game has a few more sets in it. The new set is supposed to be compatible with the existing planes from the land game, which is a point in its favor, but I don't know if that's enough.

One thing that's not clear to me is how an air game can suppport the usual CMG scheme of common, uncommon and rare models. In the land game you basically had commons for the small infantry units, uncommons for some smaller vehicles and guns and rares for the large ones and those with complex paint schemes. The naval game had a similar, obvious, breakdown of commons for light units like destroyers, uncommons for units like light cruisers and rares for the battleships and aircraft carriers.

For air units there's not such an obvious breakdown as World War II era aircraft largely came in two sizes -- single engine and multi-engine. And paint jobs were generally pretty similar among aircraft without much correlation between complexity and size of the aircraft. Indeed, if anything I'd say larger aircraft tended to have simpler paint jobs than fighters did.

It will be interesting to see how they get around that.

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