From the rulebook:
Crimson Skies is a character-based board game of dogfighting and divebombing in an aviation-dominated world; a simple, fast-playing game of pulp-fiction-style air combat. It is a game about the men and women who pilot flying nightmares, the metal-sheathed birds of prey that spit death from the sky.
In Crimson Skies, you are at the top of the aviation food chain - a fighter pilot, one of the fearless men and women who take to the skies each day for honor or profit. Each player generates a minimum of two characters, a pilot and his or her wingman. If your characters survive from mission to mission, they gain experience that can translate into better skills, and thus even better chances for future survival and success. While this is a combat board game, not a roleplaying game, telling tales about your characters will invest the game with action, drama and humor, making the game-playing experience even more enjoyable.
To keep the action fast and furious, the game mechanics have been kept simple. To be a successful fighter pilot, you must predict your enemy's location, and so the game features a simultaneous movement system that rewards good planning. When the lead starts flying, combat becomes very graphic. Each of the weapon types uses a different damage profile that literally eats into the enemy plane, tearing holes in armor and then destroying vital internal components. If the pilot has a steady hand and is able to keep his or her shots in a tight grouping, the damage profiles build on each other to dig even deeper into the plane's interior. Death comes in many forms; from wings being ripped off by weapons fires, to gas tanks exploding from a magnesium round, to mid-air collisions.
In no time at all, the sky can turn crimson with the blood of the vanquished.
The Crimson Skies boxed set contains everything needed to play the game. [...]
- Three issues of Air Action Weekly, the authority on the Crimson Skies.
- Issue 1: The Rules of Air Combat
- Issue 2: AAW's 1937 Aircraft Review
- Issue 3: Warriors of the Air
- 1 sheet of 24 Aircraft Fuselage playing pieces
- 2 sheets of 12 Aircraft Wings playing pieces
- Filled-out record sheets for 14 planes and 1 zeppelin, four blank record sheets, 2 copies of the reference sheet(a pilot's campaign log is mentioned, but did not actually ship with the game)
- Three full-color mapsheets
- 1 plastic damage template
- 14 aircraft stands
- 1 10-sided die
