About the game:
Skies Above Britain is a solitaire game depicting a Royal Air Force squadron of Hurricanes or Spitfires waging a desperate effort to disrupt and destroy German daylight bombing raids over southeast England in the summer of 1940. The player’s individual aircraft—each represented by a stickered block—must locate the incoming raid, intercept it, and evade or defeat swarms of escorting German fighters that usually outnumber you and whose pilots have superior experience and tactics. The game simulates the dogfighting and fighter-vs.-bomber action at an individual aircraft level using a card-assisted system that simulates key tactical decision-making without losing the feel of fast-paced aerial combat. A player can fly scenarios representing an individual patrol or use the patrol generator to create an endless variety of realistic individual patrols, multi-patrol campaigns, or larger campaigns covering the entire Battle of Britain. Each patrol will take a half hour or more to play, while a campaign can last anywhere between 6 and 28 patrols.
Full campaigns follow the chronology of “phases,” each representing a distinct period of the Battle of Britain and comprising a number of patrols that your squadron flies: Channel War, The Hardest Days, Peak Phase, and Late Phase. The patrol generator offers you the flexibility to play a shorter, single-phase campaign (6 to 8 patrols) or play two or more phases in order to make a longer campaign (12 to 28 patrols). A campaign will challenge you to keep your squadron intact while making an impact on the relentless wave of bomber formations roaring in from the English Channel. Each phase has its own post-patrol Random Events Table, featuring occurrences characteristic of that time period. The operating tempo of your squadron and the strain on your men will vary as the table tells you when you will have to scramble again—two days from now, tomorrow … or perhaps immediately, with barely any time to rearm and refuel.
