Gothas In The Gong

Last night Caesar and I played a game of Spandau & Lewis. This was his first game in maybe ten years (has it really been that long since I started writing these rules), and for me it was a chance to get a feel for one or two changes to the rules I made earlier this year.

We played the Goths scenario I wrote up HERE. As suggested in that post we both made a bid for how many planes would attack the bombers. We both put in a bid of 4, so ended up dicing for who got them. 

I got the bombers. Actually this wasn't a bad thing; the attacking planes are much more fun to run, and running the big slow planes made it easier for me to help Caesar with the rules.

Here are the Gothas. They have to traverse around 5' of play area.

Caesar's first attacker appeared early on; an FE8 flown by an experience pilot. It closed up quickly.

In fact Caesar was very lucky. On the next turn another defender appeared; a BE12. This was flown by a novie pilot.

And the turn after he got a Sopwith Pup! I'd barely got the bomber's a quarter of the way to their destination and I was up against three enemy aircraft.

Not only were there three of them, but they were appearing in my rear. I swung the bombers around to try and prevent tail shots, as well as close up for mutual protection.

The defenders sat behind the bombers and steadily chipped away at them. The bombers shot back. We scored lots of hits, but neither Caesar nor I could convert them to criticals. Indeed we had exactly one critical hit all night (and that just did a few more hits).

Anyway, as I got about halfway to my destination (and halfway to being shot to bits) the fourth British plane appeared; an Armstrong Whitworth FK8 with a novice crew.

It was all getting very lively now. The bombers were running out of ammo on their rear guns, whilst some of the attackers were on their last couple of shots too. A couple of attacking planes were badly shot up as well.

The Sopwith Pup was the first to fall.

The red-tailed Gotha flew on; the other Gotha was now getting all of the attention.

Lots of attention.

The wrong kind of attention.

The British switched their attentions to the red-tailed bomber. But the FE8 was now firing it's last burst of ammo.

It headed home. The BE12 did as well; it had also run out of ammo, but was also on its last hit.

However the FK8 was still relatively fresh and kept up the attack. The Gotha was getting very low on ammo and struggling to fight back, but was close to safety. Indeed it was a move away when the FK8 finally downed it.

So both bombers were shot down for the loss of only one plane. All of the planes were badly shot up; with no criticals appearing everything was just being slowly whittled down.

Caesar was lucky to get three of his four planes on early as well as being mostly behind the bombers and not too far from them. This meant that the bombers couldn't pick off the attackers one by one.

Whilst I generally track ammunition by gun, for simplicity's sake, I may consider switching big bombers and similar planes to having a pool of ammunition that the draw on (since they are using drum-fed guns). This seems to be how they operated and would allow them a better defence if they are constantly attacked from one direction; you can just keep feeding drums to the rear-gunner. 

Thanks to Caesar for a great game that went to the wire.