The Umpire Strikes Back

I was checking out the latest P500 news from GMT when I noticed the upcoming game Nightfighter. I’ve always been somewhat interested in aerial night combat during the Second World War (wouldn’t a flight sim dedicated to night combat be cool?) so seeing the name piqued my interest and I investigated more on this upcoming title.

Rather than covering only the British bombing campaign against Germany as one would expect, the game will also cover the early days with the Battle of Britain and best of all the Pacific. And yes, it will include one of the coolest aircraft of the war, the P-61! In fact, it sounds like there’s going to be a lot of cool hardware as noted on the site:

“There is a huge variety of aircraft in the game, from early Do217s and Ju88 fighters, to advanced fighters such as the He219. Rarities such as the Ta154, Me262B-1a and the Japanese J1N1 Gekko will be included. Schräge Music ('Jazz Music') oblique gun systems are modelled. The Allies get 'cat's eye' Hurricanes, Blenheims with AI Mk IV radar, Beaufighters with Serrate and various marks of Mosquito, including the NF.30 with the advanced AI Mk X radar. Pacific operations will see F4U-2s and P-61A 'Black Widow' fighters engaging Japanese bomber threats.”

Everything is sounding cool until you get to the number of players and learn that instead of two opponents facing off it will be one player and one umpire, whose job it will be to control both the attacking forces and moderate the defending player.

I don’t know. Umpires are perfectly fine for double-blind systems but even then there’s the problem of finding someone who is willing to spend all day running a game though they’re not actually playing. I umpired a Harpoon game once because I really wanted to see how a three player game with a surface force (player one), and two opposing submarine forces (players two and three) would work. Turned out to be a complete mess, as no one was plotting their movements correctly (and it didn’t help everyone was in different time scales). Still, I will admit I had some fun with umpiring that game because we interjected some role-playing elements into it.

But sitting there essentially watching someone else play a game? Seems like a boring afternoon. Makes me wonder why a solitaire system is not devised. I would assume it’s because a human will always be better than a programmed decision tree.

Who knows, maybe umpiring will actually be fun. There’s always adding RPG flavor text to running the game I suppose…