Two Check Your 6 Battles!

So Saturday night I ran 2 Check Your 6 battles. I had planned on only one but it finished so fast we ran a second.  The first outing was just a simple 4 on 4 battle with 2 Spitfires and 2 Kittyhawks going up against 2 MC.202s and 2 BF 109s.

This game was a refresher for me (and the group) as I am running a battle on 12/5 at our local one day convention. I also taught the game to 2 new people so it was an excellent primer for the convention.

Andy had control of the two Kittyhawks.

Kevin had the Spitfires.

Jeff (new player to the rules) controlled the Germans.

Jeff's planes closed in quickly on Andy.

They caused Airframe damage!

Justin (the other new guy) had the Italians. Here they are closing in on the Spitfires. Surprisingly both sides missed their targets the first time.

One last picture of the Italians and Brits.  The game ended so quickly I didn't get any other photos. The Axis players came out on top which isn't bad for 2 new players.  I think they enjoyed themselves.

For the second game Andy decided to pull out all of the Bettys I had and put them on table and said "Give them 3 Wildcats each and I'll try to survive getting across the board!"  The above and below picture are the starting positions. Again, Andy chose this folks!

Kevin's Wildcats circle around the Bettys.

Jeff's Wildcats fly through the middle.

One Betty is smoking already.

A Betty goes down!

Another Betty has gone down in Flames!

The lead Betty also goes down in Flames!

And then there were 4 Bettys.

Now there are two Bettys.  That didn't last long. The last two went down on the next turn and we called it a night.  The Wildcats only suffered 1 damaged plane in this attack.  

Don't worry folks I won't be doing this for the convention. I will come up with something a little more even. :-)  We had fun and thats all that matters.

WWI Air Battle using Check Your 6 mod.

The first game I played on Thursday was this WWI air battle.  It was a Check Your 6 mod to the original set of rules. I played the British and had two Sopwith Camels.  I didn't shoot anyone down but I also didn't get shot down.  My planes got damaged pretty well and I had fly out of the battle with both planes.  The Germans took the day.

The rules played very well and I bought the scenario book the GM had written.  It also came with all of the airplane charts.

A quick game of Check Your 6!

A couple of weeks ago I ran a game of Check Your 6!  It is by far our favorite air game for miniatures. I threw the game together the night before and thats what I love about the system.  It doesn't take much to put a game together.
So for this nights game I put some British P40s up against some BF109s over N. Africa.

A quick look at the combatants

With the sun at the British backs, the BF109s had hard time spotting them.

The fur ball begins.  Lots of shots fired but little to no damage inflicted.

The two British pilots plot their moves

And they are still thinking about it.....

The British close in

Lots of shots fired again and only some airframe damage.

With crippled planes the British pull away to fight another day.

While the game was rather uneventful with no one going down in a big ball of flames we had a rather interesting conversation afterwards.

I brought up the fact that it was difficult to simulate the advantages the aircrafts had in real life.  For example the turning ability of the Zero against the Wildcat.  

We started to put two planes back out on the table to figure out how you would use the planes strengths against its targets. 

So a BF109 uses the A chart and upon further inspection we found that the BF109 at slow speeds 3 or less it does not pay a heavy price for turns.

The P40 on the other hand is not as maneuverable at slow speeds but has the speed to get in and out quickly.

So what we decided was that when the fur ball started the german pilots should have hit the brakes and flown circles around the P40s.  The P40s would have to use their speed to do hit and run attacks and engage the BF109s in a turning battle.

I realize that most of you who will read this will say, "Well duh! Thats what you are suppose to do."  As my friend Garland stated, "we just went from being green pilots to skilled."

Some great WWII Bomber Footage.

This is some great bomber footage on a raid into Japan.  P-51's escort a B-29 flight on a bomber run.  It's rather long around 30 minutes but well worth it.

The Last Bomb