First In Flight

My adult children never know what to get me for Father's Day, so these days I tend to buy something for myself and that counts. This year I bought a newish baordgame I'd seen a few good reviews of - First In Flight.

In this game you take the role of an early aviation pioneer, and try and set the longest flight record. Everyone starts off with a deck of cards representing their aircraft, containing some basic flight distance and several flaws. The aim of the game is to improve and expand your deck, then use it to do a spectacular record-breaking flight.

Here's the game set up for a solo run-through. The ten playable aviators, who each have unique abilities, are actual people of the time, some famous and some more obscure. In this game I gave Loius Bleriot a try. 

There's some nice wooden pieces, based on aircraft of the time, to mark your flight record.

A plyer-mat gives you  place to put your character, has a quick-reference guide to some of the key moves and (just out of shot to the right) a garage in which you put any flaws you discover so that you can try to fix them.

A lucky early flight with the basic deck. Flying is run via a push your luck mechanism; your shuffle your flight deck and then deal one card at a time in a line. Cards have a distance number on them and the total is how long your flight is. At any point you can choose to Descent, which ends your flight. At that point you draw two more cards and then add the special Descend card to the end of your flight. This gives you a bonus of 5 if you don't crash.

Crash? Yes. In your deck you have at least four flaws with red crash markers on them. Each ne also causes an additional problem; one forces you to discard a card from your flight, for example, whilst another forces you to descend whether you want to or not. In this flight you can see that I drew three of them. If you get four such cards then you crash. You still count your score, but if you haven't played your Descend card then you get no bonus and if you have the bonus is reduced. In this flight I picked up three flaws, so didn't crash and scored 14. 

After a flight you can put up to two flaws in your garage. If you can fix them then they are replaced with basic flight problems, which still have a crash mark on them, but no additional issues. So there are always at least four crashes waiting in your deck.

And how do you fix things or, indeed, improve your deck in other ways? Well, you move around the board, landing on action spaces as you do so. Each circuit of the board represents one year, and the game plays until you reach the end of Year 4 or until a player does a flight of at least 40. The different spaces allow you to fly, repair and buy additional cards that either go in your flight deck or act as modifiers. You can see some of these just to the right of my player mat. There are four types; Upgrades add extra flight cards to your deck (but sometimes come with additional flaws attached), Friends give you access to various people who have helpful skills or contacts, Tech gives you things to add to your plane (such as a hinged rudder, or proper landing-gear) which make it easier to fly further or stave off disaster and finally Skills are clever things you can do during flight, many of which allow you to look at your deck and sometimes modify the order in which you play cards.

Movement around the board is quite clever. When it is your turn you can move as many spaces forward as you like, except that you can't land on an action that's already occupied. But only the player who is furthest to teh rear can move, so if you leapfrog the pieces of other player they will get to acti before you do again, and if you go far enough around they may be able to land on several actions before you get another go. The game becomes a balance between doing what you want  to do and jumping ahead to grab key actions when you need them before someone blocks them.

I did very badly as Louis Bleriot. I played a second game as Samuel Langley. He gets bonuses when picking up Upgrade cards, and can also leverage any Tech cards for extra flight distance. And I won that game with a flight of 51.

Here's my record-breaking flight. As you can see there are Upgrade cards in there with distances of 2 or more. There's also more than four crash symbols; my plane is fitted with Tech that means I crash on six cards instead of four.

My Skills, Tech and Friend (Alexander Graham Bell, no less). Some of these add extra flight distance, which is why the cards above don't add up to 51.

This is a fun game with a lot of flavour. The game comes with bios of each of the ten playable aviators, plus the friends and even the special two-player dummy third aviator, Gustave Whitehead (who, it is claimed, flew a manned heavier than air plane before the Wright Brothers). It's a nice jumping-off point for reading about this fascinating subject as well.