Dogfights!

Check Your Six! was on the plate again for our gaming group last night.   We had a good crowd of six players and were able to get in two games, one set in New Guinea and a second in the skies over Holland during Operation Market Garden.

CY6! Featuring the Me-262

I have a few Me-262 models from 21st Century Toys that I had not been able to use in any games, so I wrote a scenario to use them. American pilots would sometimes swoop down on the Me-262 bases hoping to catch the jets when they were trying to take off. To counter this, the Luftwaffe began to use FW-190Ds as top cover over the jet bases while the Me-262s were taking off or landing. In this scenario six American P-51D’s jump a pair of Me-262s with a pair of FW-190’s as top cover. In addition to the usual VP for downing enemy planes, the Germans can get VP if they can successfully climb the jets out of the top of the CAB and set off to attack US bombers.

Thunderbolts!

A while ago the 1/144th scale P-47 models from 21st Century Toys hit the shelves of my friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart, so I immediately scooped up four each of the bubbletop and razorback variants for my 1/144th NW Europe CY6 games and put them to work immediately. The games were a while ago, so my memories of the details are a bit sketchy.

The scenario sheet for these two games is available here.

Dogfight over Asch

At Historicon I had played in a one-hour demo of Check Your 6! from Skirmish Campaigns and got a chance to chat with the rules’ authors a bit. I really liked what I saw and picked up a copy, but a busy summer after that prevented me from giving the game a thorough test. So last night Bob, Ken, and I got together to give the game a proper try. I definitely was not disappointed. The game is very well done, with elegant mechanics that capture the essence of pilot’s accounts from WWII but are pretty easy to pick up and fast to play. Lots of very clever ideas in there. The aircraft sheets are well laid out and very easy to use once you get an idea of where everything is located.

I decided to play using my new collection of 1/144th ETO aircraft, so set up a simple scenario based loosely on the German raid on Asch by JG 11 as part of Operation Bodenplatte. The Germans had a pair of FW 190A-8’s down on the deck and a pair of Bf 109K-4 flying top cover. A pair of P-51D’s of the 487th Fighter Squadron were just getting off the runway. In all of the games we played, the Germans had a Green and a Skilled pilot in the FW 190s and a Green and a Veteran pilot in the Bf 109s.

Air War in Europe

A while back 21st Century Toys started producing a line of 1/144th scale WWII aircraft models and selling them at WalMart stores nationwide. While originally limited, the range has proven popular and has continued to grow. These are nice little models and the price (~$3.25 ea.) is definitely right. I already have too many painting projects, but these prepainted models offered me a chance to expand my WWII aircraft collection into a new area without the time commitment required to get all of the models painted up. I’ve purchased a number of these for the late war ETO and late war PTO. Recently I found a great source of some of the prepainted Japanese gasaphon collectible kits, offering reasonable prices and, even better, reasonable shipping. So I ordered a few additional German planes to add to my collection.