NATO Air Commander - Designer's Thoughts
I spent a lot of time this year in what one might generously term "interesting circumstances". One of the outcomes of that was a game I had in the back of my mind for years. NATO Air Commander is the first game I have ever designed and I'm particularly humbled by the show of early support from playtesters and wargamers. Tom and Mary Russell, the heads of Hollandspiele Games, were particularly supportive and I am especially grateful for that. Just like the title says, this is a solitaire game that is supposed to put the player in the shoes of an Allied Air Commander during a hypothetical World War III set around 1987. To that end, the decisions you make in this game are big theater decisions and the scale of the game works on the level of flights of aircraft. Each turn, you're creating and assembling raids and assigning missions to air units, hoping to influence the ground war - over which you have limited control. The game came out of a desire to see more