The complete rules — movement, sealed orders, firing, and damage
Aces of the Western Front is a turn-based tactical dogfighting game set over the trenches of 1917. Two pilots — human or AI — face off in WWI fighters on a hex grid. Every turn, both sides commit to a manoeuvre in secret. There's no reacting to what your opponent just did: you plot your move, submit it, and live with what happens when both orders are revealed at once.
Pick a faction and a plane before you take off. The Allies fly the nimble, rotary-engined Sopwith Camel or the sturdy SPAD XIII. The Germans fly the highly manoeuvrable Fokker DR.I triplane or the hard-hitting Albatros D.III. Each aircraft handles differently — some turn tighter, some hit harder, and one is immune to structural failure entirely. See the aircraft field guide for full specs before you enlist.
You can fly against the built-in AI opponent for practice, open a game for any pilot to join, or invite a specific opponent by username for a one-on-one match.
The battle plays out on a hexagonal grid. Aircraft occupy a hex and face one of six directions. Each turn you choose a move — a combination of speed and manoeuvre — that advances your plane and may change its heading. Moves come in three speed bands:
Speed can change by at most one band per turn, and most aircraft can only string together a few consecutive slow turns before risking a stall. Certain advanced manoeuvres — weaves, sideslips, barrel rolls, and the Immelmann — can't be flown back-to-back, so timing them well matters as much as choosing them.
This is the heart of the game. During the planning phase, both pilots choose their next move without seeing what the other has picked. Once both submit, the moves resolve simultaneously and new positions, headings, and any resulting gunfire are revealed together. There are no take-backs — you commit to a manoeuvre based on where you predict the enemy will be, not where they actually go.
Get directly behind an enemy aircraft and the engagement shifts into a tailing phase. The tailed pilot has to move first, blind, without knowing what the pursuer will do. Once that move is locked in, the tailing pilot sees the direction their opponent is turning and chooses their own move in response. Breaking out of a tail — or keeping one — is often what decides a sortie.
Guns fire automatically, with no separate "shoot" action: if an enemy aircraft ends up directly ahead of you, within three hexes, in the exact column in front of your nose, you hit. Range determines damage — the closer you are, the harder you hit.
Gun hits can also roll structural damage to specific parts of the airframe, each with its own consequence:
Any single part damaged twice causes a structural failure and your plane goes down, regardless of remaining hit points. If two aircraft land on the same hex, there's a chance of a mid-air collision, with damage based on both planes' combined speed.
Every aircraft takes off with a limited fuel supply that drains faster the faster you fly. Fuselage damage doubles the drain rate, and sitting idle for too long without acting costs you fuel on your next turn — so a sortie can't be stalled out indefinitely.
An engagement ends when one side is shot down (hit points reach zero or a structural failure occurs), runs out of fuel, is left with no legal moves due to accumulated damage, or the two aircraft drift more than six hexes apart, which ends the sortie in a draw. When a human pilot's game ends, a first-person field report is written up in their pilot's log — the AI opponent's version of the same engagement, seen from the other cockpit.