First let me start by saying don't want to step on anyone's toes here!

Here's the reason for this question...

Was tidying some old shelves out this morning and came across a game system I created back in 1996 (I have a sealed registered envelope with copies of the templates and rules)

To all intents and purposes if you squint this could be the flight path system, manoeuvre templates, rules to customise ships, pilot, weapon and upgrade cards. It includes some custom ship models as well as rules to use the micromachine starwars toys of all things! LOL

It also included fleet battles, formation rules, in fact if anything I would say it was a more in depth and customizable system than the current set of FP rules!

It also includes custom ship bases that hold all the rolling information by way of spaces where dice are kept to keep track of shields, hull, ammo etc. a sort of forerunner of the clix system if you will

Now, the only reason I am interested in the history of the flightpath system is when I created my game back in '96 I sent copies to several game companies, some in the US, several replied but insisted I sign over all copyright before they would even consider it, while I believe this may have been common practice back then I was just a young 'un and very suspicious so I basically stuck it back on the shelf and pretty much forgot about it!

As I say, not trying to stir anything here but would be interested to see where the 'original' concept came from and if it was just some subliminal imprinting on my behalf, but from what I remember I was quite excited about the originality of it all!

Interested from the UK

...........

???

What game system was that you came across anyway? Flight Path is fine but better suited for naval or air combat IMHO. It's still a fun game so it's not to bypass the physics of zero-G space and just play.

I designed it back in the day before the 'tinternet on my trusty old Atari ST, printed out on an ancient dot matrix printer (that's right kiddy winks) so I only have paper copies of all the rules I created and hand coloured templates!

Very busy this week and next but will try and scan a few pages, give you an idea on the system. The ships were quite large on average about 10cm long but that was really to allow the dice to fit on the base as back in the day I could only get hold of standard sized dice...no WWW remember!

Its sort of exciting actually, having a quick read it looks pretty cool, launching missiles with their own stands and turn templates, pilot ace skills, ejection and upgrade rules, it had it all and I remember now from the few test plays my mates and me had it worked pretty sweet and you could easily incorporate all the popular sci fi ship makes into it, space above and beyond, Babylon 5, star wars, we played 'em all!

****...why didn't I pursue this further LOL

Uh, k. You are awesome/a genius/whatever. You totally beat everyone to it.

Not really sure what the point of the question is. If its really just to say you totally had the idea "all the way back in '96!" /sarcasm, then whoopadeedoo either way.

Uh, k. You are awesome/a genius/whatever. You totally beat everyone to it.

Not really sure what the point of the question is. If its really just to say you totally had the idea "all the way back in '96!" /sarcasm, then whoopadeedoo either way.

So wait, you don't understand his question so thought being insulting was the way to go. He is curious if one of the companies he sent his game designed too ended up being the company that produced the flight path system. He wasn't looking for your praise, but to see if something he created was stolen and/or modified to be used in X-Wing.

On the contrary hida77 you don't really need to be awesome/a genius/whatever to work out the simple objective of most questions is to obtain an answer and as I searched high and low and couldn't really find a definite answer to the question heading this thread I would be interested in any info people have as to the origins of the flightpath system and its evolution as I find it hard to believe that just me, on my own without any external influence could have come up with such a similar system way back then. Now, I will set you a challenge, try doing something constructive, you go do the research and find me an answer old boy, unless of course you are just an experimental keyboard jabbing monkey/killing time while WoW updates/whatever

Oh, sorry, nearly forgot /sarcasm

Don't even know if there is a wings of war forum, I havent looked but always assumed xwing was based on that.

My suggestion would be to try posting there also as it has been around longer .

Happy hunting

I know I am bit late to the topic but I will disclose what I found.

The act of using protractor/ composes and rulers to plot vessal either

areo based or sea based has been done for well longer then this

game has been in existance. As for the name Flightpath there is

a tradmark filed on " 11/ 2/1999" but to someone else other then the

creator of this game. LAUREN ITALIA CREATIVE GROUP INC,

else there is not a tradmark on the name Flightpath maneuvering system.

The flight path maneuver templates are in fact nothing but a navel compose

broken down into verious parts. In fact flightpath maneuvering system pattent

is owned by Honeywell International Inc . and has nothing to do with a board

game.

I do not think you can own rights to a protractor / compose / ruler , but

perhaps to the name of what you call it, but not what it used for.

you go do the research and find me an answer old boy

Well don't know if he will. But I did.

X-Wing is based losely on concepts from a game called Wings of War. I've never played it, but from what I know, the two games have simular concepts but X-Wing isn't really a copy of that game.

Wings of War was published by the Italian gamne company Nexus Editrice, in 2004. FFG produced the engish version of the game. Wings of War was designed by Andrea Angiolino and Pier Giorgio Paglia.

Uh, k. You are awesome/a genius/whatever. You totally beat everyone to it.

Not really sure what the point of the question is. If its really just to say you totally had the idea "all the way back in '96!" /sarcasm, then whoopadeedoo either way.

So wait, you don't understand his question so thought being insulting was the way to go. He is curious if one of the companies he sent his game designed too ended up being the company that produced the flight path system. He wasn't looking for your praise, but to see if something he created was stolen and/or modified to be used in X-Wing.

he could have asked the question without all the background on his game, rarely does anyone include extraneous details that are in some respect irrelevant to the main question without wanting to draw attention to those details.

X-Wing's maneuver system was..."inspired" by the one in Wings of War (now, I think, Wings of Glory). According to the WoW creators via BGG, the story goes something like this: they were approached by FFG with an eye to both licensing the flight system used by WoW, and hiring on the two lead designers to consult on the design of what would eventually become X-Wing.

Supposedly contracts were drawn up and it was more or less a done deal. Then the company producing WoW went out of business and that game was out of print and there was some legal wrangling trying to figure out who even owned the rights to the WoW game - which is why it was later relaunched with a new name and new publisher.

According to them, FFG more or less saw this as a good excuse to get for free what they were going to pay for originally, and they tore up the contracts and informed the WoW creators they would be releasing their own unique game system, and later launched X-Wing. If you've ever played WoW, the movement systems are VERY similar, but with some noticeable changes (at least as many as between X-Wing and Attack Wing), and significantly slimmed down in terms of complexity.

That's obviously one side of the story, as told by a couple of guys who, right or wrong, are bitter because they feel they were cheated out of a big payday.

All of that said, fact or fiction, there's no question X-Wing draws heavily from the work done by Wings of War. Where those crazy Italians came up with the movement system, I have no idea.

Never played it, but wasn't there an airplane game called "Crimson Skies" that used something similar?

Crimson Skies used a hexmap.

Crimson Skies used preplotted movement, but not templates. It was played on a hex map, similar to a great many WWI air combat systems. X-wing definitely drew from Wings of War, but IMHO evolved considerably from that source. Yes, they both use preplotted movement and they both use templates of some form or other, but there really isn't much similarity in the games beyond that.

The OP comes off as very "Someone stole my system and turned it into X-wing." If he truly believes that, then this certainly isn't the right venue to be pursuing it even before you consider the obvious backlash it's likely to inspire among fans. And "you go do the research and find me an answer old boy"? Seriously? If you're going to go looking for help in proving that a company stole from you, fans of that company don't seem to be the most likely source of aid even before you decide to be a demanding ass about it.

Anyway, I think the claim inspires skepticism at best. Given the well-known history and evolution from Wings of War, the OP is suggesting that he created something just like X-wing that was stolen by another designer, turned into Wings of War, which eventually was used as the inspiration for X-wing and just happened to land back in a form very like what it was originally stolen from, despite the well-documented lack of continuity between the designers. Anything's possible, I suppose, but a long way from compelling.

Not to mention, unless one of the companies you sent this to was in Italy - assuming that the WoW designers, in turn, were not inspired to create their version of the system from some other game entirely - it's pretty unlikely.

Also, X-wing stole the use of dice for combat from RISK. QED.

Dear all, since you wonder about the history of Wings of War's idea... Here it is.

Wings of War comes after several other air combat designs of mine. The very first boardgame I published was Cacciatori di Viverne (1985), a fantasy air combat game. Then I published a very easy paper & pencil ww1 dogfight game on a student magazine (but you will not find it in my P&P games book published by Sterling since it involves paper, pencil and a coin - one element too much). Then I made a very steamlined dragon air combat game called (if I remember well) I Cavalieri dell'aria, that appeared on the game magazine E Giochi and was later reprinted on the RPG magazine Kaos. Then La squadriglia degli assi (ww1 again), designed with aviation historian Gregory Alegi, was attached to the Italian Air Force magazine for boys Rivista Aeronautica - Notiziario Giovani. Then it came Il gobbo maledetto, a gamebook about ww2 torpedo bombers illustrated with real ww2 photos. Then a web based air duel game called Face2Face, made with Pier Giorgio Paglia for Stream TV (two scenarios - Malta 1942 and Nemesis Spacefighters). Most of these games had contemporary plotting and movement. Apart for the gamebook, they were all based on grids (hexes, squares, even triangles). None used templates to move.

I published tabletop games with no grids, as a Dragonball Z martial arts game released back in 1998. It used several kinds of rulers for movements and ranges, but not a real template.

Wings of War is reminescent of all these designs, but it has been the first one to use templates to phisically move your planes on the table. It was created in one night exactly 13 years ago, on early February 2002. Cards from the prototype can be seen here:

http://boardgamegeek.com/image/38822/wings-war-famous-aces

It was decided to draw the templates on cards so to allow secret planning of moves, because of their flexibility (you could easily put into the game any fancy maneuvre that was specific for any single plane - as the Fokker D.VII's "turning stalls") and for economic reason, so that the game could have a cheap final price. I also found elegant to use cards for everything - planes, ground features, maneuvres, damages. They allowed the background landscape, taken from my previous La squadriglia degli assi, that contributed to a nice wargame feel IMHO. Only the ruler was actually something other than a card: in the first prototype it was a piece of string divided into ranges of equal lenght, then in production it became a rigid cardboard ruler.

Of course I had played a lot of games that have influenced me and my design. I'd name at least Air Force, Ace of Aces, Gunslinger, Blue Max, Wings, Sopwith, Droids, WRG's War Game Rules: 1000 B.C. to 500 A.D. In no particular order. But none of them had templates to determine exactly the distance your veichle/unit would move and its final orientation.

So yes, I am convinced that with Wings of War we did something new, at least from the planning/move point of view. And that we managed to put quite a lot of simulation details in a tabletop wargame that, with its basic rules, could be played by 6 years old kids: a quite unprecedented mix of realism and simplicity, if I look at the games I used to play before. In the spirit of brilliant Alfred Leonardi's Ace of Aces whose phisical limits (the use of booklets) prevented it to have the same flexibility in adding different planes, designing different scenarios, inventing house rules, allowing many players at the same table (current record for WoW is 100).

Of course I never saw Bulldoguk's prototype. I doubt it was ever sent to Italian publishers, since in the '90s we were a very closed and small market for game designers. And anyway I have always been a freelance - I seldom saw any prototype sent to publishers, this just happened with Qualitygame (Rome) and Nexus Editrice (Viareggio). He can confirm if he ever contacted these two, or other publishers in my country.

Thanks for your attention.

Thank you for that synopsis, Angiolillo. Interesting and informative. After I got into X-Wing, a friend of mine introduced me to WW1 Wings of Glory, and I am loving it ( and it has been prompting me to read up on WW1 aces, a fascinating topic itself). Thanks!

What an interesting thread. Without reading into any, potentially erroneous, unwritten intents/feelings and just taking the posts at face value there are some interesting points and historical facts to-boot.

Firstly kudos to BulldogUK for independently coming up with a great games system-as i think we can unanimously agree, x-wing's gaming system is excellent and is major reason we all enjoy the game as much as we do. I am happy to credit Bulldog with coming up with his system as i have no reason not to take him at his word. I'm not being nieve here, there is simply nothing to be gained (for me) from proving him right or wrong (the legal rights and commercial aspects side has long ago flown the coop as only a pre-dated patent would help here, which i assume there isn't so the point is moot. Even if there were it's nothing to do with me so i won't get involved with that).

I am happy to believe that similar (or even identical ideas) can and do rise independently; i long ago played a simple F1 board game called "Turbo" (by i think MB games) and developed a more advanced game system to allow upgrades such as engines, tyres, pit crews etc etc etc to occur using different dice (such as D4, D6, D8 etc etc), different bonus modifiers etc etc and thoroughly enjoyed the end result which allowed for career progression and all manor of additional extras. The system was never discussed or used out of our small gaming group so no commercial conspiracy ever occurred, yet years later a game called "formula D" appearerd-i was inwardly stoked my idea was evidently good enough to go into production.

I suppose one of the greatest examples of independently developed ideas is the theory of evolution-Darwin came up with it but never went public, when years later Wallace came to Darwin with the very same idea (developed independently) Darwin's business head kicked in and he published first BUT he was gracious enough to site Wallace and give him credit for independently coming up with the same fantastic theory.

For what it's worth, I worked on something not dissimilar in 99. But mine was based off of D6 and sucked.

It was all hitpoints and hit/evade probabilities. Nothing flight path.

It was so unwieldy I didn't pursue it further past initial beta.

Car Wars was out in the mid 80s.

Customisable cars.

Specific maneuvers that could be done with a template (or on graph paper).

Sorry, but if you came out with the idea in 96....someone beat you to it and you cannot really claim any ownership of the idea.

This game has several similarities with car wars. If Steve Jackson isnt up in arms...i see no reason whatsoever for you to feel suspicious or slighted in any way.

Honestly, any inventors claim you assume is redonkulous.

Besides...I invented flight path...in 95.

7-minute abs. Seven!

Car Wars was out in the mid 80s.

Customisable cars.

Specific maneuvers that could be done with a template (or on graph paper).

Sorry, but if you came out with the idea in 96....someone beat you to it and you cannot really claim any ownership of the idea.

Yeah, well...Star Fleet Battles was using turn templates with pre-plotted movement all the way back in the 1970s. So, nyah!

Heck, you could even allocate damage using a custom 'damage deck' for the game...