This is Ace of Aces: WWI Air Combat Game (1980). This is the very first one, called Handy Rotary Series for reasons I don’t quite understand, as it isn’t a series. Maybe it refers to the planes.

Ace of Aces is a genius idea. It’s a box containing two books, one for the Ally plane, one for the German plane. Each book contains a mind-boggling number of illustrations of a cockpit from a first-person perspective (always locked on the enemy plane) and, by calling out the numbers at the bottom, you “perform” dogfight maneuvers. And that’s basically it — use the books to fly around and try to shoot the other player out of the sky. A two-player analog flight simulator.

This thing astounds me. Like the design of it. It is so brilliant and cumbersome at the same time. I can’t imagine the work that went into this. It’s so cool! I will probably never play it!

This is the first product by Nova Games, who would go on to produce the Lost Worlds series of one-on-one fantasy combat gamebooks in the same vein. The form would be periodically imitated by other game makers — West End knocked off both versions in a Luke vs. Vader lightsaber dueling game and an X-Wing vs. TIE fighter dogfighter.