Tweedekker 1916

Lijntekening van een tweedekker

Six pilots over the Western Front, each in a biplane of their own. You write your orders in secret, three moves ahead, and only once everyone has handed in do you find out whether your plan was any good. You cannot react to what anyone else does — you can only guess where they are heading. An adaptation of Sopwith — the board game David Dyer designed in 1978, later turned into a play-by-mail game — now on the web.

Watch a game The rules Join in

Een stukje van het speelbord: een vliegveld met drie toestellen in de lucht
Een stukje van het speelbord: een vliegveld met drie toestellen in de lucht

Tweedekker1916 can also be installed as an app on your Android phone or iPhone.

New: play at home, around the table

Play Tweedekker 1916 in a single evening too: everyone on their own phone, with turns of a few minutes, and if you like a tablet in the middle as a shared game board. As a pilot you set up such a game yourself; your friends join with the link you send them. Not a pilot yet? Ask the game master for a trial link.

Play at home: how it works →

What you do

Each turn you write down three moves: straight ahead, a turn, a sideslip. With each one you say whether you fire and in which direction. That is all — filling it in takes a few minutes.

Then you wait. Once all six have handed in, every move is carried out at the same moment and you see what came of it: where everyone flew, who scored a hit, who went down.

You get four days per turn, so it runs alongside your week without any hurry. If that does not suit you, the game master can set a different pace for the whole game on request.

Why it is exciting

Because you fly blind. You fire at the spot where you believe your opponent will be, three moves from now. Guess wrong and you have wasted ammunition while he has slipped in behind you.

Thunderclouds drift across the board and hide whatever is inside them. Your ammunition runs out, so you have to return to your own airfield to reload — and everyone knows it. Anyone who flies off the board is out of the fight, so you can trap an opponent without firing a shot.

And your points carry over. Collect enough and you become an ace, with manoeuvres the others cannot fly.

What you see on the board

What you see on the board

Aircraft
Each aircraft is a biplane in its player's colour, nose pointing the way it is flying.
Ring around it
A brass ring means that pilot has twenty points or more and so gets ace advantages.
Coloured runways
The airfields, each with three runways: α to the left, β towards the centre and γ to the right. The runways are coloured in the pilot's colour. An airfield with faded runways belongs to a pilot who is out of the fight.
Grey patches
Thunderclouds. Flying into one costs damage, and you cannot shoot into or through them.
Darker outer ring
The last row of hexes. Cross it and you leave the playing area and crash.
Solid lines
The route an aircraft flew this turn, with a pale open ring (no fill, rather than the player's colour) at its starting point.
Dotted lines
The bursts fired. A filled dot in the player's colour on the line means it struck home — the pale ring at a starting point and the filled dot of a hit stay two separate things, even when they happen to land on the same spot.
Names by the airfields
Each airfield shows its pilot's name with two numbers, for example 12/16: how many more damage points he can take before he goes down, and how many bursts he has left.

Join in

Anyone may watch; flying is by invitation. Leave your details and the game master will get in touch and send you a personal link. That link is your way in: it belongs to you and keeps working in later games as well.

Your name and your email address are needed: your name tells the game master who is knocking, and your email address is where your link will be sent. Town and phone number may stay blank, but we do appreciate it if you fill them in too: a phone number helps if email turns out not to reach you.

Which language would you like to play in? The game reports come in both anyway; this is mainly so the game master knows how to address you.

Anything to add? Whether you played the game by post, for instance.

Your details go straight to the game master and are used only to contact you about this game. They appear nowhere on the site, are not passed on, and are deleted on request.More about that.

What a game looks like

A turn from The Sky is the Limit. The solid lines are the routes flown; the dotted lines are the bursts fired.

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Contact

A question about the rules, something to say about the game, or a request to have your details removed? That does not have to go through the sign-up form: write to contact at tweedekker1916.eu.

Where it comes from

This game is based on the board game about First World War air combat that David Dyer designed in 1978, widely played by post during the eighties. This site is an independent reconstruction and is not connected to him.

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