One such game I bought in 2019 was Legion Wargames' Target For Today, a spiritual successor of sorts to Avalon Hill's beloved (but sadly long out of print) B-17 Queen of the Skies. I say beloved in a vicarious sense as B-17 was one AH offering I never encountered as a young gamer and I can only rely on the memories of other gamers who endlessly sing its praises.
Despite my lack of nostalgia for the original game, the reviews for Target For Today were strong enough to convince me to order a copy and...it sorta sat on my shelf for a year. I say sorta because I did furtively lay the thing out and play a single mission some months ago. It was a bit daunting, to say the least. The game essentially boils down to a very convoluted series of tables that, via random die rolls, guide you through a single bombing run. You choose your aircraft and mission timeframe, crew the plane, and then make a bunch of die rolls on charts spread across three booklets to determine the outcome of the mission. The only real input you have as a player is determining which guns you will train on incoming fighters when the Germans inevitably send sorties of Luftwaffe aircraft to intercept your bomber group. The rest of the time you're just rolling on numerous tables to see how badly you are shot up on the way in and out and whether or not you hit your target.
It's a lot to wrap your head around the first time through. I'd be lying by omission if I didn't admit the experience feels a little bit like doing your taxes - except the part where you get to kill Nazis. To make matters worse, the rulebook isn't particularly well-organized. It does smartly guide you through the game, allowing you to sit down with the book and play through your first session using the rulebook as a guide - but as a work of reference it's practically useless. Finding a specific rule can be a pain. And the tables - oh the tables. There are a thousand of them, although you'll only refer to a good dozen or so for the majority of the game. But many of the tables sport an endless series of conditional modifiers which make your eyes swim. For a game that can take a good 2-3 hours for a single bombing run, that's a lot of time spent flipping through charts and rolling dice.
That first game went...okay. I fucked up a bunch of things and had to rewind from time to time - but I got through it. Afterwards I put it back on the shelf, resolving to give it another go.
Which I finally did today, nearly a year later. I almost went with Field Commander: Napoleon - another game that deserves more love than I've given it - but it felt like it was time to give Target For Today another chance.
I'm glad I did.
Something about having internalized the game's rules a little bit - even after a one-year gap - made a huge difference when it came to working through the game's procedures to build the unfolding narrative. And make no mistake about it, it's that last word - narrative - which makes Target For Today a worthwhile experience.
Every detail in Target For Today is ruthlessly modeled - you can even die before you get in the air, as the game forces you to roll on a chart to determine if you safely take off from your home airfield. The first leg of your journey - at least in the early-war campaign - is relatively safe, your only hazard being the possibility of rolling poorly on the random event table. But when you start to hit resistance, and the air fills with Me-109 and Fw-190 fighter jets...you start to worry a little bit about the aircrew under your command. You assign each of them a name when you create your bomber, and over the course of the game you wince every time an enemy plane evades your defensive fire and lines up a series of shots....any one of which has the potential to kill a crew member, disable a vital system, or destroy your plane. Early in my mission, The Due Diligence took a bomb hit from a green Luftwaffe pilot that could have detonated the payload, instantly killing everyone on board. It was blind dumb luck that the resulting die roll indicated mere superficial damage - but it certainly got my pulse up for a moment as I contemplated losing my entire crew to a lucky shot.
The game is full of these moments, and as you get closer to your target the threat slowly ramps up until you're fending off wave after wave of angry enemy fighters determined to protect your target (in this case the U-Boat dock located in Saint-Nazaire, France).
In the end the crew of the Due Diligence dropped their payload, but due to bad weather and some crap rolls that left them out of formation (earlier my #1 engine stopped working due to a random event, forcing me to either prematurely drop my payload or carry on) the bombs missed their target entirely. There was only one serious casualty - Tail Gunner Hernandez who suffered a crushed pelvis from a Me-110 fighter that shot up the plane's tail section just before the target zone.
The real joy, I suspect, will come with subsequent play sessions as you send the crew up time and time again, hoping to achieve a goal of 25 total survived missions. At this point doing so seems like a daunting task - and in this sense Target For Today shares a bit of DNA with another game I've been playing recently, Kingdom Death: Monster. I'll save my thoughts about that for a separate post - suffice to say they're both wonderful story generators, mostly in the way they turn adversity into a challenge...a challenge which, if overcome, will provide you with a tale you'll not soon forget.
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ReplyDeleteCool - thanks!
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