"Herr Oberst, did we win?" WWII air wargame

After Sunday's intense day of participation game at the Overlord show, we were ready for something simple at the club yesterday. A great virtue of air combat games is that the terrain doesn't usually take long to set up ... so we had a go at the latest iteration of the WWII air battle rules Colin has been developing.


These are scaled so that each model represents 3 or 4 actual aircraft, and models are organised into flight- or squadron-sized units of 1-4 models. The scenario was a nice freewheeling one: a Bombardment Group of 6 B-17 models was trying to get from one end of the table to the other, successive German units would appear from random table edges to attack them, and the US fighters defending the B-17s would also get random reinforcements. Total plane models used were, I think, 18 US and 11 German. (All 1/600 from Tumbling Dice, beautifully painted by Colin, nose art and all.)

The game rocks along quickly. Situational Awareness rolls dictate the movement options each unit has available to it - roll badly enough and you are obliged to cruise blithely ahead, straight and level - and there are clean transitions into and out of Dogfights, and combat is resolved simply and swiftly. Consequently we finished the whole game in about 90 minutes. At the end of it two thirds of the B-17s had been shot down or limped home, but a similar proportion of the Luftwaffe fighter force was not going to be celebrating much either. As it was just a quick kickabout game, we didn't have clear victory conditions, so as it was pretty much mutual destruction I'll call it a draw for the record:

2015
Games played to conclusion - 9. (not counting ones I referee)
Won - 2.
Drawn - 2.

Lost - 5.