Blood Red Skies Goes Digital

By Mitch Reed

Porting tabletop games to digital is a hit or miss endeavor. Sometimes the developers get it right and sometimes we end up getting a game that just fails. Recently acquired the rights from Warlord Games to bring the aerial combat game Blood Red Skies to the small screen. How well this will turn out remains to be seen, but my talks with some insiders make me feel confident that this port will not crash and burn. Not too long ago I eagerly awaited the digital import of Check Your 6!, which was produced by . Having played the tabletop version, I was curious to see how it turned out and I was deeply disappointed. While many board games can be ported to the digital format (Twilight Struggle & Labyrinth) successfully, I feel it is a much more difficult task with miniature games. A lot of the difficulty is translating the mechanics and the environment and developing the AI to stay truthful to the original version.

I am a fan of Blood Red Skies and I have demoed the Korean war MiG Alley set at work and at the conference in 2019. In both cases, the game was well-received. When I used the game at work to show how mechanics can be used to represent real-life aerial combat, I had graduated fighter wing commanders and weapons school graduates walk away impressed and feel the game accomplishes what it is supposed to represent. I do not think a game can get a higher endorsement which sets a high bar for the developers.

The course Diecast Digital intends to take is to fund the game via Kickstarter. While many may not like this approach, I feel it accomplishes a few important things for developers. First of all, it gauges the reception from the community. The better the game does in its Kickstarter campaign the more the team can invest in the near- and long-term production of the game.

The other factor about a Kickstarter campaign does is to allow the community to invest in a game at a level they are comfortable with. This last point is something that Diecast Digital intends to do, gamers can opt-in for the basic level of the game which gives them access to eight aircraft and a few missions from the tabletop game.

The initial digital version will be based around the battle of Midway and the later fighting in the Pacific theater and right now we know the aircraft they plan to include are;
IJN: A6M2 Zero
IJN: B5N (Kate)
IJN: J2M Raiden (Jack)
IJA: Ki-43 Hayabusa (Oscar)
USN: F4F Wildcat
USN: SBD-3 Dauntless
USN: F6F Hellcat
USAAF: P40B Warhawk

This mix of aircraft opens up so many possibilities and should make this game very attractive for gamers.

I have been pinging my sources to find out more about this game and of course, the great crew at the Lead Pursuit Podcast were a great help. If you want to listen to a great podcast and see how their enthusiasm keeps the community playing the game you need to go no further than these guys. I sat down with Doug from LPP and we recorded a great that discussed the new digital version among other things.

Based on my chat with Doug, Digital Diecast is solely responsible for this game having bought the rights to produce it from Warlord Games. This is actually good news since the developers are big fans of the game and I feel that for a port to succeed, the original tabletop developers need to take a step back and allow the coders to do what they do best.

This brings me to another point as to who the target audience is here. Targeting the current tabletop players is not a good course of action in my opinion. As I stated many times; miniature, board, and digital wargamers are just different animals.

The average tabletop player loves the modeling aspect of the hobby and human interaction. This is not a trait with digital gamers who outnumber their miniature counterparts 5 to 1. Games fail when they are ported because they are too much like the tabletop version, to pull of a successful digital game requires a different way of thinking about the end experience of the gamer. If the game is marketed for the digital community, I feel the sales would be better and the Kickstart campaign will be a smashing success.

One of the interesting goals of the Kickstarter is that the developers want to use the campaign and a possible pre-release Beta to get input from the community. This can go one of two ways, either it will be just OK or really bad. While I love the members of our community, I do see how they make unreasonable requests on developers. Go on any social media group online and you can see with any new release the “but what about” and “you forgot” crew comes out and makes demands that try to tailor the game to their tastes.

Crowdsourcing development never seems to end well, you get a vocal few that do not see the bigger picture and feel marginalized when the game comes out. I do feel that the developers will manage this process right and the end result will be a very successful game.

Another point to bring up is will the tabletop version drive players to try the digital port or will the digital game drive interest in the tabletop version. I think the ratio of players in each community would lead one to believe that a successful port will drive more players to the tabletop version.
The digital version model the Air Strike rules that were released as a supplement for the game.

I have not played this version of the game, however from my conversations with Doug I know the rules are very sound and a lot of fun.

Plus who likes to plink tanks? This guy.

The Air Strike rules include the basic rules for BRS and all the special rules like multi-engine aircraft and jets. It also brings in missions and rules that focus on hitting ground targets as well as nasty stuff like flak. The rulebook is over 80 pages and is a must purchase for anyone who either plays or plans to play BRS. Using these rules really expands the gamers experience, sometimes a furl ball is not your thing, so why not sink a carrier for a change of pace.

While I wish I had more info to share with you about this project, we will just have to wait to see what is in store for us when the Kickstarter goes live.

You can find out more about Blood Red Skies Digital;

You can pick up the Air Strike Rules here from Warlord Games.
The link for the Kickstarter will be on the page once it goes live (est. 20 Feb)