First in Flight

In First in Flight, from Artana/Genius Games, the players are pioneer aviators. All the aviators and other characters depicted are based on historical flyers and inventors, which adds to the thematic strength of the game and gives it the added bonus of an educational element. The game is designed by Matthew O'Malley and Ben Rosset, with art by Tomasz Bogusz and Amelia Sales. It takes 1-4 players but if you play solitaire or with two players you need to compete against a bot.

First in Flight is all about making as long a flight as you can over a maximum of four 'years' (ie: circuits of the rondel). On your turn you can choose to move as far as you like on the rondel but your relative position determines turn order - it's always the turn of the player in last position - so if you shoot way ahead of other players they'll get more turns than you. Players have their own deck of flight cards - initially identical decks of nine cards - but they'll be modifying and improving their deck during the course of play.

In addition to money, time is a currency in the game - paid by moving along the rondel the corresponding number of time icons. You're additionally forced to skip ahead two time icons whenever your flight ends in a crash; representing the time it'll take you to recover from the injuries you incurred.

Ultimately, of course, this game is all about taking the air. When you do so, you shuffle your deck and turn the cards over one by one. Cards will show a distance travelled but some (initially four of your nine starting cards!) will also show design flaws in your plane - actions set out in text, and a crash icon - turn over four crash icons and your flight comes to an ignominious end. At any point you can choose to descend but that doesn't mean you necessarily glide gently down to earth: you must turn over two more cards, and if that then takes your total number of crash icons to four, you don't so much descend as plummet...

Succeed or fail on your flight, you add up the distance value of all the cards played and move your plane so that it records the furthest you've flown. Your descent card will add 5 to the length of your flight if you land without crashing but it adds a distance of only 2 if the extra cards you turn over cause you to crash.

Among the modifications you can make to your deck during the course of the game is to patch up the defects. By carrying out repairs you can replace a design flaw card with a 'basic flight problem' card; these still give you crash icons but they don't have text imposing additional penalties. Repairing a design flaw will also give you an extra benefit, adding more movement cards to your deck so you'll have a chance of moving further on your next flight. The upgrade action on the rondel also lets you add two more distance cards to your deck, for which you pay in either money or time. However, tho' each upgrade card adds 2-5 to how far you can fly, they also force you to add in another design flaw card... You have the opportunity too to buy various special ability cards, including 'skill' cards that can help you maximise your flight length by allowing you to peek at and reorder the top cards in your draw deck.

Tho' ultimately each flight attempt is its own push-your-luck minigame, First in Flight is otherwise a strategy game as you make the most productive use of your rondel movement to build and modify your deck. In our plays at Board's Eye View, some players looked enviously at the asymmetric special abilities of other players' pilot cards - tho' to be fair, all 10 are pretty good.

The game ends after four 'years' (ie: after all the players have completed four circuits of the rondel) or when any player makes a flight with a distance of 40. In our plays, the latter mostly occurred during Year 3 - usually after around 45 minutes. When the end-game is triggered in this way, every player - including the player who's just hit distance 40 - gets to take one last flight: the aviation equivalent of an opera not being over till the proverbial fat lady sings. It makes for an exciting push-your-luck game ending!

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