1918 Bombing Mission

We played the game of Spandau & Lewis that was postponed from last week yesterday. This saw the debut of my new late-war French aircraft in the form of a bombing mission by three Salmson 2 two-seaters, escorted by a pair of Caudron R11s. They were being attacked by a trio of Albatros DVs and a single Fokker Dr1. 

Stuart and Jack took the French, whilst I ran the Germans. 

Here's the French approaching the target, and the Germans stalking them. 

The Germans attack. How great a start they made is shown by the red marker, which was a reminder that the plane had temporarily jammed its guns. 

The French zoomed past the DVs and headed for the target. I had foolishly sent the Triplane off on its own and as the French approached I saw just how silly a thing that was to have done. There's a lot of guns pointing in my direction there. 

The Salmsons organised themselves for their bombing run, whilst Stuart sent the Caudron escorts forward, one of them engaging the Triplane. 

Lots of pointing as things got a bit tight. As the French went in over the target the Albatri swooped in. And did very little damage. That said, one French plane failed to cross the target at all and another saw all of its bombs miss. 

The third Salmson did manage to get its bombs on target though. It was the one with a novice crew as well. It also got shot up by an Albatros. 

One of the Albatros fighters took an engine hit that slowed it down. 

And Jack used a Salmson aggressively to hunt down and finish off the Fokker Dr1 and its ace pilot. The Dr1 had been chasing the damaged Salmson and completely failed to shoot it down. 

As the bombers spread out a little after the target I managed to organise some attacks. Two of my fighters made heavy weather of attacking the one that hadn't dropped its bombs yet. 

But a shot killed the pilot and down it went. 

Sadly at the same time my damaged Albatros was shot down. 

Everybody looked at heading for home at this stage, but one of my fighters hung around just long enough to get shot down by a Caudron, just so Stuart could have a kill. 

So the Germans lost three out of four of their attacking planes and teh French got one load of bombs on target. The Germans shot down one French plane. It was a decisive French win.

Jack and Stuart kept a tight formation so they had loads of firepower pointing in all directions. I then attacked it piecemeal and paid the price. 

Back In The Air

I've been pretty ill the past few days, the victim of a particularly nasty bug. It meant that I missed my regular wargames night on Thursday (which shows how serious it is), when I was going to debut some of my new French aircraft in a game of Spandau & Lewis.

Today I felt recovered enough to consider pushing a few miniatures around a table, so I decided that if the new planes I had plans for weren't getting their outing, at least one of the other might. So I decided to run my basic patrol scenario using a French Morane N. I came up with a list of ten possible encounters and assigned them to playing cards, then created a deck as described in some earlier post I've lost the link to and which I don't have the enemy to find right now. 

Here's the teeny tiny Morane N on patrol. In terms of quality I rolled twice and took the best roll. It ended up with an experienced pilot. 

I used my experimental rules for early mounts. So whilst it counts has having a fixed gun it can only count one roll of 5 as a hit. This makes it better then a single pivot gun but less effective than a properly synced and sighted synchronised gun. 

The first aircraft encountered was an AEG GII. These were basically bombers, but in mid-1915 seem to have also been used to escort reconaissance aircraft on the grounds that they had a gun at both ends. I used one of my Friedrichshafen bombers as a stand-in, which is why it has a later war camouflage scheme. 

A tough nut to crack, but it had a green crew so I went for it.

Of course at that point a Fokker Eindecker turned up. With an ace pilot. Not good

I survived a first pass of the opposing aircraft, but things weren't looking hopeful. I'd quickly decided that running for home was my safest bet. 

Attacked by the Fokker my best strategy was to face it head on where at least the poor deflection would be some defence. We exchanged shots and between us I think we scored a hit with every dice. So the Fokker was damaged. But so was I. Badly.

I turned for home. I might just make it if the Fokker couldn't score any more hits. 

It scored a long-range hit and my Morane was forced down. 

I set the whole thing up again, with a new deck of encounters. First out of the deck - an AEG GII!

I got the jump on it and scored some damage. I would have scored more had I remembered the positive firing modifier for shooting at a large target, but I can't even remember a set of rules I wrote myself at the moment. 

I turned and chased the big German plane as it fled into a cloud. 

And the next encounter? Another Fokker! This one didn't have an ace pilot, but once again I was stuck fighting two enemy planes that were gunning for me big time. The AEG temporarily left the table though. 

Whilst the AEG was temporarily inconvenienced I chased the Fokker, damaging its engine. 

The AEG came back and a long-range shot returned the favour; my Morane's engine started spluttering. 

I finished off the Fokker.

But turning to escape brought me within range of the AEG again, and a long-range shot took me out. 

An Albatros C-type actually turned up at one point, but basically flew well out of the action so I eventually ignored it. 

Anyway, that was two singularly unsuccessful outings for the French air-force there. 

New Aircraft

This blog has been sadly neglected for weeks now. This is mostly because I went on holiday for a week, came back and then had a few more days off. I've been playing games on and off, but they've all been boardgames and I didn't document anything. I was too busy having fun.

I also haven't played much since I came back from my break because I've been busy painting. Inspired by my scratchbuild efforts from a few weeks ago I ordered some more aircraft from Tumbling Dice. They recently expanded their range of French aircraft, so I decided that would be a useful expansion to my forces and ordered one of everything. Once I got back from holiday I made a start on them. I chose three packs to start with - some Morane Ns to go with my early war collection, and then a shift forward to 1918 with Salmson 2 bomber/reconnaissance aircraft and the wonderful Caudron R11 escort fighters. 

Here's everything finished and painted. The late-war French aircraft took the most effort as I had to work out how to do French five-colour camouflage. I actually employed Gemini AI to suggest which paint colours to use, getting it to take into account that the models are 1/600th. The selections it came up with work pretty well. 

So here's the Morane N contingent. They're tiny models - possibly the smallest Tumbling Dice do in their WW1 range. Also a simple build - you just attach the landing gear. The rest of the plane is cast as a single piece. 

I painted two with French markings and two with RFC markings. They weren't used in any great numbers; only 49 were built, in fact. And they were considered difficult to fly so were given to competent or experienced pilots and, it appears, employed individually. So you probably wouldn't need more than a couple for a game. 

Moving forward to 1918, here's the Salmson 2 bombers. They were nice simple planes to put together and look sturdy and reliable. 

The Caudron R11s come as a pack of three, because they are big aircraft. They are an interesting concept for WW1 - a heavy escort fighter. They are twin-engined, and had a crew of three - a pilot, front-gunner and rear-gunner. The gunners each had twin pivot machine-guns. Basically the aircraft was a gunship. I'm looking forward to trying one out - performance-wise it isn't quite on a par with enemy fighters, but it's not actually that bad. It looks like it will be a tricky opponent. 

It looks like the Germans flirted with the heavy fighter concept back in 1915 with the AEG CII. It's a similar design to the Caudron R11 and was one of the 1915 solutions to effectively mounting machine-guns on a plane - a twin-engine plane gives you the option of guns firing forward. I can see my Friederichschafen bombers masquerading as an AEG in a forthcoming game. 

Here's the Caudrons escorting a flight of Salmsons. 

I have plenty of packs still to work through. And I'm already considering my next purchases; the RFC could do with some French aircraft for starters, and I can see a few gaps elsewhere that need filling. 

Ten Years Ago - October 2016

I think October 2016 was the one and only time we played the precursor to 'Maurice', 'Might & Reason'. Owing to a shortage of commander figures we ended up fielding Death as Charles XII. My venerable Risk figure armies got used. They've seen a lot of use these past few years. 

So head back in time and enjoy Ingmar Bergman's 'Might & Reason'

Thursday Night Live

Yesterday we had our first game of Gaslands in a while. There were three of us and we all chose to run one vehicle apiece. We ended up with one of my favourite scenarios (and one of Caesar's least favourite scenarios), Saturday Night Live. This is the ne where you chase around collecting Audience Votes which mostly translate to Victory Points. First to 15 wins.

Caesar went with his Freeway Fighter, this time maquerading as a Miyazaki vehicle
Craig had a rally-car with the handling and robustness of a truck and packed with Scarlett pirates like a clown-car. 
I ran the Yellow Submarine, which is a Mishkin technological terror featuring not only a nuclear engine but also a teleporter. 

Mishkin isn't normally great in this scenario, because their Audience Votes are generally quite low. However I had several unique weapons, and (I hoped) a vehicle capable of competing for the various spot-prizes the scenario offers. 

Freeway Fighter and Yellow Submarine begin the game.

Caesar and Craig met in the centre and a furious exchange of gunfire saw both vehicles damaged. 

To be honest I lost track of a lot of what happened. Craig managed to shoot up Caesar and then ram and destroy him, picking up votes by doing so. Caesar had done a bit of funky Miyazaki movement prior to that and acquired a few votes. And were were all collecting votes for the spot-prizes as they came up.

Yellow Submarine isn't heavily armed, but can put out a bit of firepower. Craig and I exchanged shots.

Craig had sown a couple of minefields, and Caesar's newly regenerated Freeway Fighter contrived to run into one of them. Amazingly it took no damage. 

I got Yellow Submarine into a tight spot and used the teleporter to move back out of danger. I then moved back up and unleashed my Thumper - an awesome sonic device that forces opposing vehicles to make a flip check. Caesar failed and took damage. 

I used teh teleporter to get around the corner safely, leaving Caesar and Craig to fight things out for a bit. Craig and I were both looking strong in terms of victory points, whilst Caesar had barely troubled the scorer. 

A close shave for Craig.

I think this was the point that Caesar got shot up and destroyed again. I think he got a lot of his audience votes from being wrecked. 

I'd brought Yellow Submarine back into the centre, chasing spot-prizes. I was doing quite well, but sadly the next vote I got was when Craig shot me up and wrecked me. 

I think I may have returned the favour somehow. Whatever happened we had a few phases where there were no active vehicles in play. 

And they're back! We all respawned. Craig was out of shot at the top. I chased Freeway Fighter (teleporting to get closer).

At this stage I saw I was only a few victory points away from winning, so I started looking for a quick finish. Using my Eureka! trait to magic up a one-shot tank-gun allowed me to not only destroy Craig's vehicle, but got me a point for using a unique weapon. With only two points away from a win I got to activate. The spot-prize was for declaring a T-bone smash-attach, so I used my teleporter to get into position on Caesar, and lined up a ram. I got the smash, and ended up one point short of the win.  

But the ram caused me to wipe out. And that caused me to flip. And a flip with a nuclear engine means the vehicle simply explodes. And that meant I wrecked and picked up the final audience vote I needed for the win. 

Amazingly I somehow managed to pick up two spot-prizes during the wreck process! So the final scores were:

Me - 17
Craig - 9
Caesar - 6

I got four points just from my Mishkin sponsorship - using unique weapons. I wrecked twice for two more points. The rest were from aggressively pursuing spot prizes. 

It was great fun to get back into the arena after too long a break.