Description

Above the Clouds! is a set of air-combat miniature wargame rules for fighting large air battles from the late 1930s through the 1970s.

The rules are intended to produce a free-flowing and fast game to represent air combat. Although air warfare is a very technical form of combat, rules which focus too much on the technical details quickly lose the "feel" of air combat by turning the game into a slow, plodding simulation where seconds of combat time require hours of game time to resolve.

To avoid this, a fairly minimalist approach was taken in the game design. Individual aircraft have unique capabilities, and pilot skill/experience determines advantages and disadvantages, but the emphasis in the game is rapid execution of turns so that they game moves quickly.

• Each player will typically control 2-4 aircraft
• Minimal plotting, make a quick decision for each aircraft and move on
• Aircraft speeds should matter, but it should not take more than a couple seconds to determine speed changes
• Combat should be decisive and quick to resolve
• Aircraft damage should not be overly detailed -- aircraft will either be fully functional, crippled or destroyed
• It spans the gambit of combat from WW1 through the wars of the late 1930s (Spanish Civil War, 2nd Sino-Japanese War), WW2, and 1950s-1970s (Korean War, Arab-Israeli Wars, Vietnam War)

—description from the publisher