Zero Leader (DVG) Review

[@uwebech5825]

Thanks Marco. I still haven't gotten the shrink wrap off of mine yet but will get to it soon. Last gameplay for me was with Phantom Leader Deluxe. I doubt this will be too different except perhaps for the fighter dueling. I love how they named a pilot after Pat Morita (Remember, when cleaning your Zero, wax on, wax off). :) Looking fwd to trying it and thanks for the recce.

[@robertthurman9866]

Marco only played the PnP version of Corsair Leader which was really a beta. The latest version of Corsair leader is very close to this version. Zero Leader takes CL and adds a few improvements. The U.S. in WWII started with old slow aircraft and only a few experienced pilots and got better very fast. It was the opposite for Japan, and this game models that. At the start you have the best aircraft and a lot of experienced pilots. In the end you just get pilots with maybe 4 hours of flight time and aircraft that has not been serviced due to lack of parts and mechanics. This game really demonstrates how important ground crews are. And as an extra you can combine both CL and ZL into a two player game.

[@mikolajwitkowski8093]

Dogfighting system came in Corsair leader, you probably never read the rulebook back to back as you said, at the end they talk about combing the games and rules difference.

[@nydaloth]

In Phantom Leader and Hornet Leader air to air was simpler. Does the added complexity of the dog fight rules drag the game?

[@Caratacus1]

Good question and also the reason why I haven't purchased the game. It seems to bog everything down in a previously fast-paced game which still yet remains primarily about squadron management. Who cares about which way a particular enemy plane is facing...

[@jasonstapley1265]

The dogfighting is probably my favorite aspect of the game but it does add some time to gameplay. In my opinion it’s not a drag but others could feel differently. One other unique aspect introduced in Zero Leader that wasn’t mentioned in the video is maintenance of the aircraft after each mission. Damaged planes don’t just repair themselves like the other leader games, mechanic resources have to be allocated for repairs and basic maintenance and those are limited. It’s meant to reflect the fact that the Japanese were working with limited resources as compared to the Americans.

[@robertthurman9866]

Not really. As the old adage goes "when you learn the system" it goes quick and as Marco said you can visualize the dogfight action. This was what WWII air combat was about, position. Taking this out of the game will lessen its theme considerably.

[@BollocksUtwat]

@@Caratacus1 "Who cares about which way a particular enemy plane is facing..." Anyone in a ww2 dogfight lol. Its not slow at all. Frankly even with the added complexity the game is brisk, but also I find it quite lacking in meaningful decisions to make. So it just makes everything better for those who like it as it was. Doesn't add much for those who didn't like it.

[@Deltium5683]

This game is very interesting

[@nydaloth]

The sites don’t look thematic. The level of abstraction seems higher. It’s that so?

[@robertthurman9866]

It's not bad. Remember this is a squadron planner game. You do get general targets like in real life. Bomb an ammo dump, strafing runs assisting an amphibious landing, bomb a secondary airfield. You don't always take part in a major battle. This is the day to day average missions that most of the units performed.

[@BollocksUtwat]

Its extremely abstracted. The sum of the abstaction is also quite mechanical and lacking in meaningful decision making. I get why some love this sort of game but to me its all window dressing on a dice roller table that could be almost any theme tacked on to it. And worst of all the leader games are decades old and the rule book is a mess, there's hundreds of counters but not enough of the most used counters and too many of the too few used ones. The hundreds of cards describe differences in pilot capability that amount to a single digit of difference between them usually as well making it a lot of bloat for not a lot of reason.

[@wartable]

Wish it was a GMT game…the rules are a disaster.

[@BollocksUtwat]

I found this game rather bland and lacking in decision making depth while also being not especially thematic despite the overabundance of cards and counters. It offers a ton of content but the content isn't more than a distraction and time waster for me. The dogfight rules don't do much more than add a bit of complexity to the choices but ultimately its a dice roll and its obvious where your odds should be. If the game did it for me I'd say it was immersive and told a story, but it didn't really. The rules and mechanics are quite abstact to the point it loses a lot of that story telling. Get good enough results on your campaign? You get your recon track far enough over to arbitrarily remove bandits and sites at your whim once examining the mission. A pilot gets a half dozen kills and is promoted in rank? Maybe its another +1 or just an extra Cool or Situational Awareness counter. Its nothing like say Fields of Fire where the depth of choices are decisive and immense. Random targets and enemies are equally lacking in depth. Just more points to kill, a veteran pilot is just a +1 on the attack or defense, a different bomb is just a slightly different chance to hit. There's not much in the way of tactics or thinking. The odds are pretty clear at every juncture. As such its little more than a roller coaster and your squadron management is basically a question of how easy you made it by choosing which campaign, either early war and easy or later war and hard. But even "standard" difficulty is a breeze. I suspect for many the "expert" campaigns will be the standard to them. Fields of Fire, to me the model of a great solitaire decision maker game, offers so much granularity because its abstracting the right parts while retaining the essential tactical factors. Leader games, at least in the WW2 environment, even with dogfighting rules, are abstracting to an extreme. Its just rolls upon rolls with modifiers chained to steps. Also inexplicably we have like maybe 11 counter sheets, hundreds of cards, and the single most commonly used counter (Samurai Spirit) is under stocked here to the point I'm using in a campaign nearly all my hit counters as proxies for it. Meanwhile I have more sake and kamakazie and various other rarely used counters than I'll ever draw. Baffling choice, on a 2nd edition funded by kickstarter no less! I wanted to like the game but in the end I wished I'd tried out Storm Above the Reich instead.