108 card deck and 1 rules sheet. One Small Step, 9416 Mira Del Rio, Sacramento, CA 95827; (916) 362-0875. Boxed . $? Those of you who feared that Jon Compton's One Small Step company, and its flagship magazine, "Competitive Edge", had disappeared beneath the waves like some literary Titanic, can rejoice … at least on a small level. Compton has extracted OSS from the financial graveyard that it was in and started shipping its promised jet fighter, combat card game, Fox One, along with some other card game on futuristic infantry in powered armor suits, called Battle Chrome. CE #12 will ship in January (maybe) with a boardgame version of Battle Chrome plus one on Stalingrad called Kessel. That, alone, will put them two items ahead of the once mighty GMT. Fox One comes in a double-sized deck containing 108 cards and a rules sheet; happily, it is not a collectable, for each deck is a complete game. The deck is composed of 12 environment cards, 23 aircraft cards, 24 missile cards, and 49 action cards. Play begins with the placement of 6 environment cards in a line, to mark the zones through which the planes must fly and fight. These cards represent either clear skies, cloud cover (makes combat harder and escapes easier), or rough terrain (don't fly low here). Next, the players select their aircraft and missiles from one of four eras: Korea, Vietnam, Arab-Israeli, and modern NATO-Warsaw Pact. The aircraft cards are quite beautiful and show the degree of sophistication of computer-aided design available today. Information is revealed in icon boxes, which show the aircraft's radar, dogfighting, mach speed, and g-force ratings, plus missile, bomb, and fuel capacity, value (cost), generation, and any special notes or capabilities of the aircraft. This presentation is very well thought-out and professional, although not as clever as the instrument panel display in GMT's Down in Flames series. After the players have selected their aircraft and missile loads (if any), perhaps selecting various qualities of pilots to even out the values, the players are dealt their hand of cards and a die is rolled, modified by the player's radar, to see in which zone they are initially placed. The game proceeds with the players moving their planes one zone (or spending fuel to move two zones), changing facing, or staying put and saving their movement as an energy point to be expended on the play of certain action cards. Since this movement is not simultaneous, the second player has a large advantage by being able to respond to the first player's moves even if that player is tailing the other. Combat is then conducted by firing a missile, or dogfighting with guns if both planes are in the same zone. The playing of certain action cards can affect the position of the planes or modify the dogfighting or missile combat ratings of the attacker or be used to respond to an opponent's move. Missile combat in wargames is usually boring, and Fox One doesn't buck this trend. Late generation fighters sitting back, lobbing radar-guided missiles at each other is a case study in cardboard ennui, so the early fighters are more entertaining. This earlier generation missile combat is more fun because the target aircraft must be tailed to keep the firing of heat-seeking missiles from being a waste of the taxpayer's money. Since there are only a few cards that modify missile combat, dogfighting is the kicker here. Maneuvering the aircraft is done with the action cards, but I got no real, dogfighting feel because the 49-card action deck is made up of 22 types of cards, none of which really interact with each other. Perhaps I was expecting a more elegant and easily visualized maneuvering system like that in Down in Flames. Another problem with F1 is systemic in the small card game genre: minimalist production. The player must provide a ten-sided die and various markers to represent energy and fuel points expended and amount of missiles carried. Hopefully, these needed markers will be included in the next module of the game (Fox Two?), which will include rules for bombing … if it ever comes out. The game is quite easy and straightforward to play, except that no explanation was given as to what the two symbols at the bottom of every action card mean. A brief call to the designer elicited that one value represents how many of that particular card are in the deck (to facilitate you villainous card-counters), and the small aircraft silhouettes show how valuable the card is (for those of you who just can't decide which card to discard). Another important detail that was not explained is on the aircraft cards: if the plane's missile value is in red, then it may fire heat-seeking (IRH) missiles. The only real technical inaccuracy that I could find was the semi-active radar homing rating given to the Russian AA8A Aphid missile. This model is infra-red homing, the AA8B model is radar-guided. When Fox One was first advertised, it was to contain lots more print-descriptive inserts. In all fairness, the game does contain 12 more cards than promised, but I would have preferred the expanded rules, data, and articles. They would have provided a dose of need depth. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphic Presentation: Excellent, clear, and professional. Playability: Easy and fast-playing. Replayability: Only one scenario, but eleven types of aircraft, encouraging rematches. Creativity: A simplistic Igo-Hugo merry-go-round of move, shoot, play a card. Ho-hum. Wristage: Minimal. Historicity: Good research. But, the exclusion of the wealth of technical data, scenarios, and articles hurts the game's feel. Comparisons: GMT's line of air combat card games is much more fun and innovative. Nova's Jet Eagles (modern Ace of Aces) dogfighting game is more entertaining. Overall: Beautiful, but rather uninteresting. Jon Compton has managed to bring his game company back from the dead, but it is still woozy, disorganized, and necrotic. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #24 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1996 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com