Flying Colors and DiF Squadron pack arrive

A nice big white box showed up at Casa O'Hara this week after a very, very long wait, compounded by the Christmas season mailing slows and a big plague breaking out at the GMT shipping and receiving department. In it were FLYING COLORS, the new commercial version of Mike Nagel's older DTP game of the same name, and the DiF SQUADRON PACK #1.

The Flying Colors game seems fairly simple for an age of sail game. There's no comparison, for instance, with CLOSE ACTION or even WOODEN SHIPS AND IRON MEN. As Mike says up front, it derives from the older GMT game WAR GALLEY (for the command system).



The rest of it seems fairly straightfoward, kind of like a distillation of Wooden Ships & Iron men. The goal of the design seems to be to focus on the macro view of fleet combat. I've only punched a few counters yet, but I would like to give "Trafalgar in an evening" a try. We'll see.



The DiF Squadron pack really is a welcome addition to the series. All sorts of updates to existing cards as well as brand new, obscure planes from minor nations are included. From the GMT siteblurb:

included will be such important aircraft as the British Typhoon and Tempest, the German Bf-109G-6/R6 and Fw-190F and the American P-63A Kingcobra (which was used extensively in combat by the Soviet air force). The pack will also contain a number of more obscure but interesting aircraft, like the Rumanian IAR 80, the German TA-152H and the Polish PzL 24, the only fighter in the Greek inventory at the time of the Italian invasion in 1941. Speaking of the Italians, there will be a number of Mussolini's fighters in the pack as well, including the Cr42 Falco, the M.C. 202 Folgore and the G.50bis Freccia. All of these planes will be done in the upgraded graphic style of "Corsairs and Hellcats".

This is one of those "If you like this sort of thing, than this is the sort of thing you will like" reviews. If you are a fanboy of DiF, you've been looking forward to this release for a while. I'm glad to have the new cards, particularly the minor nation aircraft.

Graphically, the art is the usual outstanding job.. although the insufferable use of "ace names" named after the playtest team is way overdone, to the point of being annoying.

Note: the Italians definitely "represent" in this release, and justifiably so; Italy is the odd man out of the Down in Flames series. The Italian Regio Aeronautica started the war with the CR-32 in great numbers; I seem to recall some of these being represented on cards in the Malta scenario published in a long ago C3I. I wonder if there are plans to repring the CR-32 cards in color...