Roleplaying Games
‘Night Witches’ is an Incredible Game About Women, War, Trauma, and Screwing Your Friends
Junior Lieutenant Oksana Boykova lay on her cot in the infirmary at the Buchholz Airfield. Until recently, it was a major airbase for the Luftwaffe. Now, it housed the 588th Night Bombers Regiment of the Red Army Airforce. Boykova had flown many dangerous mission with the 588th, as a pilot and Section Leader, and then as a navigator. But tonight she was recovering. A mission near embattled Berlin had resulted in a shattered windshield which had wounded her face, possibly even damaging her eye.
She listened in the waning dusk light as her comrades took off in their rickety Po-2 bombers: biplanes about twenty years out of date with engines that reminded one of a sewing machine motor. Having been on a night schedule since she started flying for the Soviet Air Force in 1942, she lay awake in the darkness next to Daz, a mechanic-turned-pilot who had broken her arm on the same mission over Berlin. They waited all night to hear the sound of the engines as her comrades returned.
The sound never came. It wasn’t until days later, when three of her friends returned bearing the body of the fourth that she found out what had happened, that the planes had been too badly damaged to make it back to Buchholz. That everyone was…
