As I sit at my desk sipping tea, I hear the rain pattering outside. On this dreary day in England, I find myself plotting a bombing raid deep into Germany. I wonder how many aircraft will make it back.
No, this isn’t a memoir from someone in Bomber Command in 1944—it’s me playing Gary Grigsby’s Eagle Day to Bombing the Reich (EDtBtR) in England, 80 years later, in autumn, with tea in hand. Some things never change.
If it hadn’t been for a generous discount in the Matrix Games store, I probably wouldn’t have picked up this game—it’s over 15 years old, and I hadn’t heard much about it. I took a calculated gamble, and it paid off—hopefully, just like that bombing raid into Germany.
To describe EDtBtR, let’s start with its structure: it’s two games in one. You can play the Eagle Day scenarios as the Axis or Allies, focusing on the early war years when the Allies were primarily on the defensive. There’s even a “What if?” scenario imagining a German strategy more focused on the UK than on Russia. This campaign spans 184 turns, with each turn representing one day.
Alternatively, you can play Bombing the Reich, which includes various scenarios, including the massive 622-turn full campaign running from 1943 until the end of the war. This is the campaign I started, and after two weeks of playing (between cups of tea), I’m only on turn 10!
The game uses a WEGO system, where both you and your opponent (AI or human) complete a planning phase—deciding where to bomb, conduct reconnaissance, or perform fighter sweeps. Once you end that phase, the flights launch, and the air war plays out over the day and night. All you can do is watch and hope your strategy succeeds.
The level of detail in EDtBtR is impressive. You have to consider factors like morale, cloud cover, radar, light levels, range, altitude, and more. The more you understand the real-world dynamics of the air war, the better equipped you’ll be to plan and execute effective campaigns. I’ve already learned a great deal, and I haven’t even touched on nighttime bombing operations, which almost play like a game within a game and require an entirely different approach.
While the sheer scale of the air war, along with the ability to plot numerous missions and raids, can feel intimidating, the game does include an auto-planning mode. For instance, if you’re not interested in planning nighttime “Terror” raids, you can set some parameters and let the AI handle the details. This feature is useful if the process becomes tedious or if you feel the AI might do a better job!
One of the best aspects of the game is the freedom to prosecute the air war as you see fit, allowing you to shape your own strategic bombing campaign (if playing as the Allies) with the resources available. For example, in my playthrough, I have so far avoided the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission—a mission that suffered heavy losses and, in hindsight, might not have been the best idea. This freedom to rewrite history is satisfying, though Hollywood could take note; it would be nice to see a WWII story that isn’t a one-dimensional “British bad, America good” narrative.
Some of you may have noticed that the title is a quote from Bomber Harris and that I wrote “Terror” raids with quotation marks—this game is authentic, and you do indeed conduct nighttime area bombing raids on cities. One of the scoring matrices is even labeled “Terror.” This was a war of survival, and it’s easy to judge when your own cities aren’t being bombed to smithereens.
Your choices in the air war also affect the ground campaign. For instance, when Operation Avalanche, the invasion of Italy, begins in 1943, you are expected to support it. The more effectively you support this operation, the faster the ground campaign may progress. While I haven’t personally seen this impact yet, forum discussions suggest that it does happen. This kind of integration is a great feature, as it allows your air war decisions to influence the larger war without requiring micromanagement of every aspect.
Of course, the game has its drawbacks. The user interface is dated and can be awkward to use. Sometimes, it feels like stubbing your toe—you just have to grit your teeth and push through. The graphics and sound are minimalist, conveying information reasonably well but showing their age.
The instruction manuals could be better, but the game’s Discord community and the Matrix forums are fantastic resources. (Though, amusingly, the Discord channel has the developer’s name misspelled as “Grisgby” instead of “Grigsby”!) I also had to use a program called “dxwnd” to get the game running on my Windows 10 PC. Luckily, the forum community helped this tech novice get it up and running, so there’s hope for anyone who’s less tech-savvy.
In conclusion, I think this game is brilliant. It presents difficult decisions that challenge players to manage their resources carefully, yet it allows them to design a strategic bombing campaign they envision. While the UI and graphics are outdated, there’s nothing else I know of that attempts to portray the complexity and scale of the air war in such detail. The WEGO system, rather than IGOUGO (I go, you go), also adds an element of suspense, as you watch the battles unfold, sometimes with satisfying results—and sometimes with horrifying losses.
Anyway, the rain has stopped, and the clouds are parting. Perhaps the 100th Bomb Group will be able to take off for their mission soon.
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