Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
More strategic control
How it plays
How does it play?
Guide an aviation pioneer through workshops, test flights, repairs, and record attempts while refining an unreliable early flying machine into a winning design.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Push Your Luck
Choose whether to secure current gains or risk them for a larger reward.
Rondel
Move around a circular action track that limits which actions are currently reachable.
Race
Compete to reach a destination, threshold, or objective before opponents.
Variable Player Powers
Each player has different abilities, restrictions, or strategic advantages.
Turn Order: Time Track
Determine or change the order in which players take their turns.
Read the full game description
First in Flight turns the dawn of powered aviation into a strategic race around a shared time track. Each player leads a historical pioneer, builds a personal deck of glider cards, and tests a fragile aircraft whose flaws only become visible in flight. Crashes are useful information: after a test, you can repair weaknesses, improve the design, or push onward for a longer attempt. Traveling around the rondel opens workshops, research, events, and record opportunities, but every action costs time and changes who acts next. That makes tempo as important as engineering; a rival who spends less time may take several turns before you fly again. Variable pioneer abilities, assistants, and challenge cards create distinct development paths, while the solo mode preserves the pressure of the race. The result is a thoughtful push-your-luck deck-builder where failure is not a dead end—it is the evidence that makes the next machine better.
