Not good enough to win a Two on One yet

For our second game I wanted to play something quick (we had less than an hour) and still use some toys I hadn't played with yet so I set up a 2 on 1 fight with myself controlling a Fokker E.III and my opponents working together with a Morane-Saulnier Type N and an Airco DH-2. I erroneously told the French pilot his plane didn't have an Immelman T

Lining up a shot

urn card, which affected his play until he found, late int he the game, that he did have the card after all. Fat lot of good it did me.

My basic plan was to fient towards the DH-2, gte him to react and then swing around and deal with the French plane. Because I though he did not have the Immelman available I planned to use an Immelman myself to pull in behind him.

The plan sort of worked, but was basically mooted by the fact that one of the first hits on my plane by the Morane-Saulnier started a fire. This is always bad news, but the fragile Fokker was especially vulnerable. As it turned out, the damage cards I drew for the fire were not too damaging -- except for the last one. Meanwhile we traded shots. I almost caught a big break when the two Allied planes collided! But it turned out to be a mere brush by, as the French plane took no damage at all and the Britisher just a few points.

The inevitable happened on the final fire card draw which was a 5. I only had one point left so that was more than enough to end my flight and my fight. The DH-2 ended up with a half-dozen points of damage while the French plane was actually unscathed.

Everyone was ready for more action, so there will be more Wings of War/Wings of Glory this summer.

One afternoon over Italy in 1917 ... a Wings of War/Glory session report

Baracca's SPAD lines up for an early shot

At the local game shop played a couple of quick games of Wings of War/Glory. Turns out there are some interested players so i hope to get a few more sessions in over the summer.

The first game was an excuse to try out the big Bomber models and rules. I gave myself an Italian CA-3 heavy bomber with a SPAD XIII escort against a c

Wave!

ouple of Austro-Hungarian Albatros D.III fighters, each controlled by one other player..

This was my very first time even trying the bombing rules, so I considered the mission a success if I managed to get any hits at all on the bridge target near the map's center.

As the bomber my plan was pretty straightforward, I was going to head straight for the target, dropping down from altitude 4 to altitude 1 to increase accuracy. There was no anti-aircraft defense at the bridge and I figured the altitude change might throw off the inexperienced AH pilots a little as well. My SPAD was going to take a quick pass at the left hand enemy plane and then turn on the other one. The t

Close call

wo Austrian pilots closed, with the one on the right trying to swing wide around the bomber for a rear shot.

The SPAD got in an early shot and swept past the Albatros as planned and then the Allies got a break. The very first shot by the rear gunner exploded the Red Albatros! I had considered taking the explosion cards out of the deck, but I figured "what are the odds ..?" As a wargamer, I really should know better. The odds were virtually certain.

Bomb run

Well, in any case, this was not an acceptable outcome so early,
as it left me with two planes and one of the opponents with none, so he was reincarnated as the Italian SPAD pilot and we played on.

As it turned out, in my inexperience I misjudged the bombing approach and had to come around again, which gave the surviving Albatros a few opportunities for more shots. There was little damage to the CA-3, however, and it successfully dropped the bombs for half damage and few off. Meanwhile the SPAD and Albatros tangled a bit. No one was downed, but the Albatros was worse off at game end.

Wings of War: Session and casualty report

One of the pitfalls of a public gaming day is the risk of mishaps, and so it was on a fine July afternoon that my Werner Voss Albatros D.III met its end in its maiden flight. Sigh.

The day's inaugural battle at the redoubtable Arkham Asylum was a small version of my "Lafyatte, We Are Here' scenario. On the Allied side were a rocket-armed Nieuport 16 and a Nieuport 17, both from the Lafyatte Escadrille. On the German side was the above-mentioned Albatros, defending a Balloon with the help of three ground-based machine-gun nests.

As the balloon-busting mission is inherently challenging, I took the two Nieuprots while a rookie player (one of the Magic: The Gathering crowd at Arkham Asylum) took the Albatros.

It was an entertaining battle, as the rookie flew decently enough and I, too, am really a rookie, having just a few game under my belt as well. I'm pretty familiar with the rules, but like a newbie out of flight school I still need some seasoning in battle. In any case I was able to get qute a few shots on the balloon, but not enough to down it. My planes took a few hits, but neither was in danger of going down, barring an unlucky hit. I hadn't been tracking turns, but my guess is that were were close to or slightly past the 12-turn stand when the German player announced this would have to be his last turn. Ah, if only we'd just ended it there. While willing enough, the rookie was rather obviously much more comfortable rifling through cards than handling miniatures gently and there had already been a few close calls when somehow his hand brushed across the table and the Albatros went flying (I didn't see the move). Instinctively he did the wrong thing and stepped back and there was quite a loud crunch as Voss' plane became a compete wreck.

He gallantly offered twice to pay for the model, but I refused. I had invited him to play, after all, and frankly, I blamed myself because I had allowed the model to be too close to the table edge -- it was actually off of the playing mat and should have been replaced with the card, hindsight (and my future practice) tells.

There was a break in the action and when we resumed I ran through a couple of solitaire games with Frank Luke alone in his SPAD 13 against the balloon and its machine guns. The first mssision ended in the first shot as the balloon blew up! Fun, but not really very instructive. So I played through again and managed to down the balloon in just under the 12 turns on the second play through. This is an indication of how challenging the balloon busting mission is -- even unopposed it can be tough.

At left, Frank Luke lines up for a shot at the balloon.

A new rookie pilot, intrigued by the balloon busting (and thankfully much more adept with his hands) took up the challenge of defending the balloon. This time it was Luke and Rickenbacker against a Fokker D.VII. I gave Luke incendiary bullets and made him a bullet-checker, so he'd have less change to jam.

The new rookie, while new to Wings of War, was another experienced Magic player and also has played a few of the other wargames I've brought to the store on occasion. While not a wargamer, he's a smart dude and a quick learner. And, as I found out, the Fokker D.VII is areal nasty foe. Indeed, this was the very first time I'd seen it on the board nad it's shockingly maneuverable. It has several maneuvers that I haven't seen available to any other plane, as matter of fact.

Still, things got off to a decent start. While the Fokker nicked Luke on the way in, he and Captain Eddie were able to get multiple shots on the balloon and start to whittle it down. The ground fire wasn't too bad . I was able to wiggle Luke in through a gap in the anti-aircraft ring and Rickenbacker's direct challenge to a gun resulted in a couple of "0" damage draws. So far so good.

At right, the Fokker just misses a shot at Luke.

Meanwhile the Fokker was able to draw a bead on Rickenbacker for a close range shot. The first card drawn was another "0" but the second was the dreaded explosion! Captain Eddie was gone, just like that. Naturally this cahnged the tnor of the fight considerably. Luke doggedly made passes at the balloon, which stubbornly refused to go down, despite being set on fire a couple of time. Luke managed a couple of passing shots on the Fokker as well, including a few nicely lined up on the tail. (After the battle the German player revealed that all the Fokker hits were "0" or "1." ) Finally Luke scored with an "explosion" card and the balloon was down -- but Luke himself got caught up in the blast and his battered SPAD 13 went down as well. The Fokker was also within the blast zone, but survived with a total of 11 hits.

The nice thing about Wings of War is that it's easy to pick up, and I plan to host another round of battles in a couple of weeks --although with a little more care to prevent real casualties .

The balloons are tough to take out -- I think next time I'll let the Germans try their hand at it. The Fokker D.VII was a shock. It's clearly far better than a SPAD 13. I'll have to throw a Snipe into the mix next time I use those.

Wings of War 3-sided air battle session report

I think Wings of War miniatures is just about the perfect Game Store Game.

1) It's visually appealing, especially if you use the game mats.

2) It's extraordinarily easy to teach, with very intuitive game mechanics -- no charts, phases, rule lookups.

3) It plays fast

4) It's dramatic

5) World War I air combat is a favorite topic for wargamers and the wider culture.


I decided to try a 3-way scenario.

First I gave myself Richthofen's Roland CII -- the one without a forward -firing machine gun. The game objective was very straightforward. If I landed at the far airfield I won. If someone shot me down, they won. I gave myself a Pfalz DIII as cavalry coming to the rescue from the far side of the map.



To my left were a trio of British planes flown by the redoutable Game Store Tony -- two Sopwith Camels and an Se-5a. To the right of me were three French planes controleed by another Game Store regular named Cory, who's one of the stalwarts of the Magic: The Gathering crowd. He had two Nieuport 17s and a SPAD XIII.


The twist in the scenario design was that each Allied player also controlled a German Albatorss DVa flying escort for the Roland. The victory condition was that whoever shot the Roland down won, so the two All;ied teams were in competition. The allies were prohibited fron shooting at each other -- French on British violence -- but they each had a German plane they could use to hinder their "ally."


The battle itself was a messy affair, as none of the pilots had much experience. The Roland had to endure a few passes in the first rush but the inexperienced Allies found it hard to set up for a second shot. Game Store Tony's British did the most damage, but he twice jammed his guns! There was a scary episode for the Roland as one burst staretd a fire that did some serious damage but eventually it went out. The Alies conceded when it was apparent the Roland would succeed in landing before they'd get back into firing position. In the end no planes were shot down. but everyone enjoyed themselves.

Wow, that took a long time to see the table! Wings of War session

You know, sometimes it's just hard to get a game on the table. And sometimes it's even hard to figure out why.

Wings of War should have been easy to play before now. It's quick. It's easy. I have all the stuff needed and then some. I've been collecting expansions, miniatures and accessories fora couple of years and yet something always seemed to get in the way of getting any of it one the table.

But finally the logjam broke a little bit. A few days ago I did a couple of solitair balloon-busting missions and today I took the balloon down to the comic book store to see if I could get some interest going.

No problem at all. With the Wings of War playmats, a balloon and a few planes there was an enticing scene and four of the Magic players decided to try their hands. Three of them took Nieuports (a pair of Nie 17s and a rocket-firing Nie 16) while one of them joined me to defend the balloon. I took an Albatross DIII while the other fellow took Kempf's Fokker Dr1.

A good and bloody time was had by all. The poor fellow in the Fokker managed to fly in front of every single of of the French planes at some point and eventually went down without doing much damage in return. My Albatross was able to circle around one of the Nieuport 17s and shoot it down just moments after it finished off the Fokker. Meanwhile the other Nieuport 17 made a pass at the balloon, poking a few holes in it, but as he came in for another shot an unlucky rifle bullet blew up the plane!

Unfortunately for the Germans (me) I was unable to haul the Albatross around to pester the Nieuport 16 before that pilot got a rocket shot lined up. While the first rocket salvo missed entirely, the second salvo blew up the balloon and that was that.

The final tally was one Balloon and one Fokker downed by the French arcraft, one Nie 17 downed by ground fire and one by me.

The entire game took less than an hour to explain, play and pack up. A good time was had by all and I expect to run a few more scenarios soon.

Playing surfaces for collectible and expandable miniatures games -- a review: paper

One of the things I don't care for about collectible and expandable miniatures games is that you have all these really nice-looking miniatures moving around on cheap paper battlefields for the most part.

The notable exception is Heroscape, of course, where the terrain gets pretty much equal billing with the miniatures and is one of the distinctive aspects of that game.

And the truncated Navia Dratp also featured an actual mounted playing board as standard equipment.

But for the most part the standard has been to provide rather flimsy paper maps, usually poster-sized and poster-quality, that simply can't stand up to the normal wear and tear of multiple folding, let alone play. Among the games that come with this sort of playing surface are Lord of the Rings Tradeable Miniatures Game; HeroClix, Axis & Allies miniatures, A&A War at Sea, Star Wars, Dreamblade and Dungeons & Dragons miniatures.

Suitable playing surfaces are also an issue for more traditional miniatures games like Wings of War, Check Your 6, the Admiralty Trilogy and the Flames of War, but the traditional solution was for players to spend the time and effort to create their own terrain, not just armies. Still, there are some portable solutions for the problem of providing suitable battlefields to go with your miniatures from these lines as well.

I'll look at some of these next week, but first let's look at what's provided by the manufacturers as standard equipment.

In most cases the base game includes one or two poster-sized or smaller battlefields -- usually printed on both sides -- providing at least two and sometimes four basic battlefields. In some cases, such as Axis & Allies there are more maps of a smaller size, but in this case the maps are geomorphic, meaning they can be combined in various configurations to create more battlefields.

Generally the artwork is pretty decent for these sort of maps, although there are some exceptions. For example, the early HeroClix maps were very amateurish. Most of the time the maps look pretty good.

Another good thing about the paper maps is that they tend to be relatively inexpensive. Most of these miniatures games use quite large battlefields compared to typical boardgame standards.

The most serious drawback of the paper map usually becomes apparent right away -- the creases from folding the map. This can be corrected by folding against the crease to make the maps lie flat, but this begins the process of destroying the maps. In most cases the paper used to make the maps can't go through this sort of folding more than a half dozen times before you start to see tears. It's better to store the maps rolled. I use mailing tubes. This does result in the maps being curled, but it's less destructive to flatten out the curve than folds.

Some players go so far as to laminated their maps, but I think this is too expensive for general use. Most laminated maps are stored flat, but this takes a lot of room.

Of the games I have, I've stuck with paper maps only for Axis & Allies, Miniatures, D&D miniatures, Heroclix and LOTR:TMG. In each case the need to have many different battlefields available has required that I settle for paper maps. In some cases there's no alternative, but D&D minis do have some cardboard battlefields available and the are a couple of vinyl maps for Hero clix out there as well.

Some of the other games, however, due to their subject matter, don't vary the battlefield as much and here there are some more options. Among them are Dreamblade and A&A War at Sea. I'll look at them next.

One of the things I like about the Wings of War series

Most tactical wargames focus on the usual and the typical while selecting the machines represented. Tank games are filled with T-34s, Shermans and Panzer IVs, naval games will have Fletcher class destroyers, Type VII U-Boats and Kongo-class battleships and air combat games will have plenty of Bf-109s, P-51s and Zero fighters.

The Wings of War series games don't neglect the usual, but they also feature plenty of unusual twists that often end up prompting the remark " I didn't know that!?"

The latest Wor;d War II edition of the Wings of War series -- Fire From the Sky -- has a number of the planes you might expect. There's a German-flown Stuka, an American Volunteer Group P-40 and a US Navy Dauntless SBD among the provided aircraft. But there's also a P-40 flown by a Soviet ace, a Yak-1 flown by a female Soviet ace, a Stuka that was flown by Yugoslav partisans and an RE 2001 flown by the Italians on the Allied side.

WoW designer Andrea Angiolino has an apparent weakness for these sort of off-beat fieldings, examples abound in the entire Wings of War line. But I think it's overall a good thing, even if it might mislead some folks into thinking that some of those oddball planes represented something more common than they really did. I don't doubt that that Yugosllav partisan-flown Stuka existed, but I'm also sure the number of sorties flown by such a plane must have been miniscule comapred to those flown in German -- and even Italian -- service.

That female Soviet ace is a remarkable person, but she was one of just two female Soviet aces in the whole war (both were KIA).

Still, I applaud the inclusion of these sorts of planes. Besides being informative, it expands the scope of possible games are very little cost. Sure, there probably weren't very many dogfights between Co-belligerent Italian RE 2001s and Romanian-flown Bf-109s, but it makes for an intersesting matchup.

Wings of War and the globalization of wargaming

One of the great joys of wargaming is learning neat new stuff. It's an added bonus over the general fun of any game, where you can exercise your intellect and competitive spirit. It's something that's relatively uncommon outside of wargames, with the exception of trivia-style games. Even pretty-heavily themed non-wargames rarely provide anything deeper than generally available knowledge about their topic.

Ah, but wargames are different. Even fairly simple wargames usually have terrain, order of battle and other information at a deeper level than found in most popular histories and some of them are original works of scholarship in their own right.

For the first few decades of popular wargaming the hobby had a very Anglo-centric focus. While there were some wargame publishers and designers outside the English-speaking world the vast majority were from American, British, Canadian and Australian sources. Unavoidably this introduced some biases as far as subject matter went. Generally I think the level of history discourse in English is pretty high and most authors and game designers make an attempt to be as objective as possible, but it's still refreshing to see other points of view. Even within the English-speaking history community there can be different viewpoints on subjects. All one has to do is bring up Field Marshal Montgomery or the War of 1812 to see that there's always at least two sides to every story.

The last dozen or so years have seen an explosion in wargame interest all over the world. While the core of the hobby is still American and British, some of the most exciting gaming has some from other countries such as Germany, Japan, France and Italy. One manifestation of this trend has been add copy on game boxes in many maguages. Hasbro's Axis & Allies Miniatures, for example, includes descriptive copy in English, French, Italian and Spanish.

The Wings of War series of games is Italian in origin, and is probably the most popular aerial wargame right now. So it probably shouldn't be a surprise that the game includes more Italian planes than French or American and nearly as many as the British.

Still, I'll admit is is somewhat as a surprise. Brought up on British and American histories of the air war (supplemented by a few German accounts) , I always had the impression that the air war over the Western front was where all the action is. Other fronts, if mentioned at all, were given a cursory treatment.

A moment's consideration shows that this must have meant a lot of action was simply omitted, not that it didn't happen. The war raged over thousands of miles of front in Russia, Italy and the Middle East, not just the few hundred miles of France and Belgium. There must have been a lot of use for airpower over those vast distances. Even the ground campaigns on those other fronts usually don't get a lot of copy, but the air war even less. So seeing the Italian, Russian and Austrian planes in Wings of War helps illuminate an aspect of the Great War that I didn't know much about.

There's even less attention in English historical writing about the post-World War I fighting. American histories, especially, seem to end abruptly with the armistice and don't say much about what happened afterwards. Europeans know that the fighting didn't end everywhere at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. Indeed, it went on for years as the empires of Russia, Austria and the Ottomans disintegrated, rarely peacefully. Wings of War provides a glimspe of this fighting, too, with various expansions depicting Red Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Polish and Czech aircraft.

And the World War II version includes Vichy French and Italian co-belligerent forces as well as the usual British, German, French, Japanese and American planes.

This is neat stuff.