The dogfight you Dreamed Of—in three dimensions, on your table
The dogfight you dreamed of—in
three dimensions, on your table
Designer: Phil Yates
Creator of Flames of War and
Star Trek: Away Missions
Publisher: Savage Mouse Games
Online Presence:
boardgame/475419/
angels-one-six-battle-of-britain
Contact: phil@angelsonesix.com
Angels One Six Overview
August 1940. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance in the skies of Britain. Exhausted Spitfire and Hurricane pilots climb desperately to meet yet another wave of German Heinkel bombers, while Messerschmitt fighters dive from the sun to protect their charges.
In Angels One Six, you’re not just moving pieces around a map—you’re leading a flight of fighters in the most crucial air battle in history.
In the hands of veteran wargame designer Phil Yates (Flames of War), the swirling chaos of aerial combat becomes faster, more instinctive, and more cinematic.
Real flight mechanics remove the usual obstacles between you and realistic tabletop dogfights. Climb and you slow down. Dive and you speed up. Manoeuvre hard, and you’ll be low on energy next turn. Trade altitude for speed, position for shots, and hope for survival.
Your first game will see you developing your own combat manoeuvres as you swoop on your foes. Beyond that, many exhilarating dogfights await as you master your aircraft—and the skies.
Phil Yates
Games designer Phil Yates approaches design as a question: how do you take a complex system and make it playable without sacrificing story or authenticity? His answers are built on his training in operations research, a discipline dating back to the Second World War that seeks efficient solutions to real-world problems.
Phil led Battlefront Miniatures’ game design for 25 years. He’s best known for Flames of War, the hugely successful World War II miniatures game. He wrote four editions of the game, dozens of theatre and intelligence handbooks, and supported a vibrant international tournament scene.
Taking the same approach to a Cold-War-gone-hot setting, he went on to design WWIII: Team Yankee. Both games feature combined-arms combat built to feel balanced and historically accurate, while staying playable in an afternoon.
Alongside his miniatures games, Phil designed and developed board games for Gale Force Nine:
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Star Trek: Away Missions (including six expansions and organised play kit)
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Star Trek Ascendancy: Final Frontier (2nd edition rules, five expansions, and solo mode)
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Enola Holmes: Finder of Lost Souls
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Wise Guys
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Dr Who: Nemesis
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Dr Who: Time of the Daleks
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Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps (including three expansions)
Phil now designs independently through Savage Mouse Games, the studio he founded to publish
Angels One Six and his future designs.
Savage Mouse Games
Savage Mouse Games is a New Zealand miniature wargames studio founded by veteran designer Phil Yates to publish his own designs. Its first release is Angels One Six, a Battle of Britain air combat game built on real flight mechanics and true 3D dogfighting.
Links
Creative Assets: https://angelsonesix.com/press-kit
Rulebook: https://angelsonesix.com/rulebook
How to Play: https://angelsonesix.com/how-to-play
Permissions
You’re welcome to use anything from this kit or the Angels One Six website in your coverage—reviews, previews, news, or video. That’s what it’s here for. A credit to Savage Mouse Games is appreciated. Need something else? Email phil@angelsonesix.com
One Line Hook
The dogfight you dreamed of—in three dimensions, on your table
How Angels One Six Plays
In Angels One Six, you choose pre-painted German or British models, apply decals to individualise them, then magnetically click them onto their telescoping flight stands.
In the air, you manage three resources, trading one for another to turn, climb, dive, and shoot:
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Height—shown on the flight stand
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Speed—shown on the airspeed indicator
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Pilot awareness—shown on the action gauge
Each turn, you work across the manoeuvre chart on your cockpit display, from left to right, spending actions and airspeed to perform manoeuvres. Every type of aircraft has its own chart, giving it unique handling characteristics.
Despite the real-life physics and aeronautics baked into the game, there’s no maths. You simply rotate the dials on your cockpit, elevate your flight stand, and move along the custom ruler, as shown on the manoeuvre chart. It’s so intuitive, you’ll rarely open the rulebook.
To keep the pace brisk, all the aircraft on one side move and shoot together—you don’t need to wait for your wingman. Then the other side goes. Most games finish in 30–60 minutes.
“The physicality of the game is great. Setting dials, changing the height of the planes—it all immerses you in the world of the game.”
—Judge C, Pavs Game Awards
“I design serious wargames for the Australian Army and have more than 80 sets of wargame rules for air combat. I appreciate the challenge of determining the appropriate level of fidelity in the rules, balancing reality, and the need for playability or simplicity. Given that, I feel you have hit the right balance in the simple, yet elegant rule mechanics that you have come up with.”
—Major Andrew Somerville,
Australian Army Battle Lab
“I was really pleasantly surprised by the rulebook and how easy it was to understand everything.”
—Judge A, Pavs Game Awards
Game Details
Players
Age
Playing Time
Components
Price
Rulebook Languages
2–4 players (1v1 to 2v2)
Unlimited with expansions
14+
30–60 minutes
Pre-painted, ready-to-play aircraft miniatures on telescopic, height-adjustable flight stands
Cockpit displays
Custom ruler
Custom dice
NZ $170 (approx US $100, £75, €90) core box with Kickstarter discount
English, French, German, Spanish
“Through the excellent manual and an example battle you’re eased into the game, then sucked in deeper and given a nuanced toolset to have exciting aerial battles.”
—Judge C, Pavs Game Awards
Core Box Contents
The core box contains:
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2x Painted Supermarine Spitfire aircraft
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2x Painted Messerschmitt Me 109 aircraft
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2x Aircraft ID decal sheets
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4x Cockpit displays
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4x 3D flight stands
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2x Cockpit and flight stand sticker sheets
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1x 40-page rulebook
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1x Range and movement ruler
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22x Custom dice
“It’s a beautiful piece of work—this is clearly a labour of love, as the level of detail in the planes, the player boards, and all the different dice is breathtaking.”
—Judge A, Pavs Game Awards
Box and Contents
Expansions and Gaming Tools
Along with the core box, the release will include:
Four fighter expansions:
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2x Painted Supermarine Spitfire aircraft
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2x Painted Hawker Hurricane aircraft
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2x Painted Messerschmitt Me 109 aircraft
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2x Painted Messerschmitt Me 110 aircraft
Bomber expansion:
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1x Heinkel He 111 twin-engine bomber
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2x Junkers Ju 87 ‘Stuka’ dive bombers
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1x Handley Page Hampden twin-engine bomber
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2x Blackburn Skua dive bombers
Double-sided gaming mats:
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Gaming table size, 180cm x 120cm (6’ x 4’)
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Dining table size, 120cm x 90cm (4’ x 3’)
Dice packs:
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17x British custom dice
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13x German custom dice
Double-sided Gaming Mats
“I have to especially call attention to the flight stands! When I first put the plane on the flight stand, I was immediately charmed. It LOOKS and FEELS like flight.”
—Judge A, Pavs Game Awards
How Angels One Six Came About
It started in childhood, pitting Airfix models against each other on my bedroom floor.
Even then, the ‘we both pick a manoeuvre, then reveal it’ method still found in most dogfighting games was a poor fit with the pilots’ accounts I was reading. The flow was off. Determined to do better, I worked out what it would take to make an alternating turn work—one where each player reacted to their opponent’s moves, just like the pilots did.
Jump forward a few decades to the early 2000s. Now, with a degree in operations research and some serious games design experience, I decided to have another go. This time the focus was on simplifying movement to create flowing, dynamic games without complicated turning-circle apparatus. A simple break-move-turn structure turned out to be intuitive, and to need nothing more than a ruler.
Then came the fun part for a maths nerd like me: getting heavy on the maths so the players wouldn’t have to. Drawing on my operations research skills, I gathered every real-life combat comparison I could get my hands on, studied up on aeronautics, and collected data on a huge
number of aircraft. Putting it together, I gave each aircraft very different handling characteristics just through subtle changes in their manoeuvre charts.
After years of playtesting, I ran into the problem of production. Back then there simply wasn’t a practical way to make the high-quality pre-painted aircraft and flight stands I was after—and I wasn’t going to simplify all this and then ask players to paint things. So I put the game aside, concentrating on Flames of War and its offspring, then on an interesting array of board games with Gale Force Nine.
That changed in 2023, when a solution to the production challenges appeared. In the three years since, I’ve been hard at work getting all the components together—aircraft sculpted, prototyped and produced; colour schemes and decal sheets designed; the complexities of the 3D flight stands sorted out; the graphic design for rules and components just right; and finally, actual samples in hand.
It’s been a long journey, but that dogfighting game I dreamed as a child is finally real. It flies fast and true. Take a turn in the cockpit and see what you think!
Battle of Britain Campaign App
Build legends, or lose them. Savage Mouse Games is developing an app that lets your group run a Battle of Britain campaign, where your pilots develop their abilities and learn deadly tricks—or become one of the fallen few.
"I was afraid it might be too simple to just fly at each other and be done with it, but the design is clever enough to give you options. So even what looks like a losing battle can stay exciting and be turned around with some surprise manoeuvres and some dumb luck. It’s a really good time!”
—Judge C, Pavs Game Awards
Credits
Game Design: Phil Yates
Graphic Design: Florentyna Butler
Cover Art: Antonis Karydis
Aircraft Sculpting: Roman Vasilyev
Photography: Casey Davies and Phil Yates
Translations: Ian Burgos, Marc Didinot and Peter Katelaan
Design and Marketing Team: Ian Burgos and Fiona McLaughlin
