Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s Undaunted has grown storied over the past half-decade, crossing the beaches of Normandy, the sands of North Africa, and most recently the besieged city of Stalingrad. That last installment proved one of my favorite light wargame experiences of all time, a grueling and personal perspective on the Second World War’s turning point.

Now the series’ fourth major installment is taking us to the skies. I’m trying to decide whether the letdown it fills me with is thanks to the furious pitch and ambitious quality of Stalingrad or because this system is ill-suited to what Battle of Britain is trying to accomplish.

Look to the skies!

The first pair of the game’s eleven scenarios strictly occur before the Battle of Britain begins, as skirmishes between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe during the Battle of France and the evacuation of Dunkirk. In the usual Undaunted fashion, Benjamin and Thompson trickle out the myriad units and systems that will define the experience; ace pilots, anti-aircraft guns, cloud cover and barrage balloons are yet to come. But these opening scenarios still set the tone for the game at large. The Luftwaffe is the aggressor, flying newer and faster equipment. Their foes, the RAF, are sluggish and outdated, desperate to catch up. Scenarios, then, usually feature a clash of objectives. Where the Germans are bent on accomplishing strategic goals, such as sinking ships or bombing targets, the RAF is portrayed as a plucky underdog whose objectives are more primal: survival and downing a handful of enemy planes.

These early scenarios also establish the basics for how aircraft move and fight. Unlike the ground-based forces that have hitherto defined Undaunted, with their gradual scouting, suppression, movement, and painstaking control of strategic objectives, there’s something wonderfully untethered about skirmishing in the skies. Facing matters: most planes can only fire forward, and it isn’t long before one realizes that the planes that can fire in multiple directions are clunky and inaccurate. The same goes for momentum. This is a game of lining up angles for a strafing pass or bombing run. Every card requires its attached plane to actually move, hurtling forward and sometimes past their targets.

Along the way, the first rime of artificiality creeps in. But we’ll get to that.

Before long, complicating factors are added. Clouds prevent easy targeting. Guns on the ground prevent targets in the air from maintaining a steady course. Ships steam their engines to put distance between themselves and the raptors circling overhead. Barrage balloons hang in the air, threatening to clip incautious wings. New technologies are unveiled; pilots learn to turn on a dime; further squadrons are added. A few hours in, Battle of Britain marks itself as the most colorful entry in the series thus far.

Engagements over land are more visually gripping than those over water.

More than that, Benjamin and Thompson fine-tune the formula. The core loop is still present and accounted for. This is a deck-building game alongside a hex-based skirmish game, and cards must still be purchased into your deck before they can be drawn and deployed. As before, there’s a personal touch that elevates the whole affair. Wargames have always risked fetishizing equipment and formations, and in the process faded the human toll of the very conflicts they seek to enliven. I’ve written much about the advantages of seeing your soldiers’ faces. Battle of Britain cares about the planes — their speeds, their firing arcs, the pockets that allow following planes to target them more effectively. But it also cares about the men who flew the planes, the warm bodies in the cockpits. There’s a marked difference between inflicting damage by, say, rotating a counter and trashing an actual face from your hand.

Other adjustments are well considered. Where previous entries allowed soldiers to make infinite potshots at one another, hoping to roll that target-crunching 10, the wider distances make any shot above the range of a d10 outright impossible. This is the game’s subtlest but most effective change, forcing players to take big risks. Sliding into range of an enemy means they may well also be in range of you, provided they can wheel about in time. Similarly, because these vehicles move so rapidly but boast the turning radius of a soaring dumpster, it’s necessary to consider the angles in advance. Turns are generally less impactful, taken one at a time. It’s only as they’re taken in accumulation that this ballet takes form.

At the same time, Battle of Britain also begins to creak at the seams. I mentioned artificiality. Every wargame is artificial to some degree, of course. It’s in the nature of any representation to only capture its topic imperfectly, through abstractions and concessions, and board games have an especially fraught, if historied, relationship with warfare. Yet there are problems worth mentioning.

Here’s a big one. Whenever you play a card, your plane takes an action and moves. Perhaps that action is firing its guns, dropping a bomb, or maneuvering to alter its facing. Whatever you do, however, the plane must move. But there’s an inverse corollary at play. When you don’t play a card, your plane doesn’t move. Rather, it hovers in place, suspended more stolidly than a cloud. At other times, the exploding shells from a flak cannon may pin your craft in place, flipping it to the opposite side — a direct replica of the suppression mechanism from earlier entries in the Undaunted series — only to return to service when one of its cards is played. The result is not only counterintuitive, but a tectonic rift between the game’s two halves. Don’t get me started on what happens when your plane flies into the board’s edge. Okay, get me started. It’s forcibly reoriented, as though rebounding from a rubber mat. While there is a minor penalty to such a vicious turnabout, such maneuvers are soon incorporated into one’s game-oriented strategy. Fire, fly, get tumbled from the trampoline for another pass.

As ever, seeing your characters is part of the draw.

It’s easy to see why these decisions were made. Despite Undaunted’s commitment to a certain degree of grittiness, these are light wargames, not chrome-addled simulations that consider elevation and formation integrity. There are other, denser games for that. Can you imagine a system where every plane moves each round, regardless of whether a card was played? I can, and it’s not an enviable vision.

All the same, Battle of Britain makes the illusion more brittle than it was elsewhere. On the one hand, this is the first installment to consider communication. Certain cards are most effective when your planes are within comms range of one another. Any farther apart and they will add worthless discord cards to your deck, acknowledgements that air combat is messy and chaotic.

At the same time, however, the card system comes into sandpaper friction with how one’s card economy functions. Many scenarios in Battle of Britain are a race: the Luftwaffe hopes to bomb a certain number of targets before the RAF downs a certain number of their craft, and vice versa. But because every hand only sees three to five cards being activated, it quickly behooves you to only draft and play cards that will further your objectives. Or, even, at its gamiest, only inflict casualties that will properly winnow your opponent’s hand.

This leads to an entire series of unfortunate decisions. As the RAF, only drafting the cards that will let my aces get off the ground, while deliberately leaving others to their fiery fate. Or only firing at bombers no matter how many times I slip into the kill pocket of an enemy fighter. Every card I remove from my opponent’s deck improves their chances of drawing others, so I decline to open fire at all.

To some degree, these curiosities might have suitable explanations. We’re preserving ammunition, perhaps. Giving our best squadrons the best chance of survival. Focusing our fire. Except such explanations hang in the air like the Boulton Paul Defiants I haven’t moved in six rounds, as hovering tattletales that this system isn’t up to snuff. Where Undaunted depicted shifting frontlines and squads well enough, it’s simply too static, too blimpish, for what it’s trying to portray here.

Bombing planes while they’re stuck on the ground.

I admire the effort. The system underlying Undaunted is a formidable one, easy to grasp but sturdy enough to retell the tragedy of the Siege of Stalingrad. Battle of Britain stretches for the skies only for its reach to exceed its grasp. The result is the first entry in the series to leave me wishing it had kept its boots where they belonged.

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A complimentary copy was provided.