Gushing About Sortie

Sortie is a game with an outsized impact on my mind. While not the most complex board game or even the one that I've played the most, it's stood out to me for not only implementing play patterns that I enjoy, but for what I feel is a brilliant example of using game mechanics to simulate an idea.

It's a game about WWII dogfights. It comes in a wooden case emulating the shape of a large book, which gives it an air of extra quality.

Everyone places their airplane on the appropriate starting place on the hex board, and then every turn each player chooses a card from their hand and lays it face down. Each card has a Maneuver half and a Dogfight half, and the way I have always run the game is that whatever half is closest to the board is what you're doing. Maneuvers move you forwards or backwards and allow you to turn, and Dogfights let you move laterally. Cards are revealed simultaneously, then starting with whoever has the First Player medal the movements are all completed in clockwise order. Once movements are completed, then going clockwise again all the planes fire at the three hexes directly in front of them and shoot down any planes that are in them.

Sortie is a game that plays quickly, and it's very easy to jam two or three games into the same "session" or time it would take to play something else. I found it made a great in-between or pickup game at board game nights.

The mind games that come with submitting your plays simultaneously are something that appeal to me. It was one of the elements that made Marvel Snap appealing. Having to guess where your opponent will end up, then figuring out where you can shoot them down from. Or if you can't, how to not get shot down and put yourself into a position to attack the following turn. Naturally your opponent is doing the same, which turns the game into a yomi layer exercise.

Yomi layers are what step of predicting your opponent are you on. You predict what your opponent will do, and prepare a counter. But your opponent predicts that you will do that counter, and counters your counter. But you prepare a counter to their counter to your counter.

I find the mental exercises in prediction very compelling. The moments when a plan crystallizes and succeeds, the narrow escapes, the random bursts of movement, the learning of how the opponent plays, all of that is my jam and Sortie packs it all into a quick, direct experience.

The way that Sortie handles the cost of cards is also brilliant. It's a sublime execution of mechanics simulating a concept and stayed with me since I first read the rules.

Most cards have you discard cards from your hand to pay their cost. Bigger maneuvers that traverse more spaces require more cards. But your cards in hand also represent your altitude when checking to see if players collide. Especially in this era of dogfighting, without guided munitions, managing the kinetic and potential energy of your fighter was critical. And potential energy often came in the form of altitude. If you have more space to dive, you have more space to gain speed and therefore energy.

What Sortie does is take the potential energy of a real plane and turn it into the potential actions available to a player. In order to try to line up with your target and shoot them down, you will be expending your own potential actions and trying to force them to expend more potential. One card I did not mention was the Climb card, which is a very slow and predictable maneuver that isn't discarded when you use it, but draws cards and thus gains you altitude and potential again.

Your goal is to force your opponent out of options, make them bleed off so much possibility space failing to escape you that they're left with the Climb and thus easy pickings for you.

Every game does this, but most games don't make the cost so directly integrated into the mechanics and theme. In Magic, for instance. When I decide to play This Card, I am forgoing being able to play That Card in this same timeframe. Or when I give up my tempo to play neither of those cards in order to hold up an instant-speed option. But here the cost is only my tempo, and my tempo is not a mechanic of Magic.

Perhaps it is just due to personal hyperfixation. When I was a teenager and the History Channel wasn't a punchline, I absolutely devoured a show called Dogfights that recreated real-world dogfights with then-cutting edge CG work and interviewed the pilots involved if they were still alive and had extra commentary from military historians, piloting teachers, and other experts. So that especially primed me for being ready to understand what this game was simulating and appreciating it for the sublime execution.