Above the Clouds!

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.

To achieve this, the following concepts guided the game development:

 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