Air Goons aren’t short of ambition. The organisers of Under the North Star, a multiplayer wargaming experiment without parallel, want to sim the response to a fictional Russian invasion of Northern Scandinavia using a host of off-the-shelf PC games and a small army of plucky volunteers.
If all goes to plan, at regular intervals a handful of player-commanders will turn democratically-determined theatre priorities into specific tasks and missions, then the rank and file will attempt to execute those missions using titles such as DCS World, Arma 3, Command: Modern Operations, Flight Simulator, and European Truck Simulator.
Will Air Goons manage to attract and retain sufficient players to keep their dynamic conflict moving? Will the homemade rules and systems that allow the various games to interact and produce plausible frontline dents, kinks, and bulges, prove up to snuff? I hope so. Experimental co-op wargames as ambitious as UTNS deserve to succeed.
It seems that there is a considerable entry barrier here, but I love that people were able to organize this and get the show running!
But I will stay with kriegsspiel for now personally. For me it feels like at this point the games themselves feel like some kind of placeholder.
But if it works for the people that play this – it’s huge. I would love to watch some recordings of their exploits and read the AARs, not gonna lie.