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Air Strike! review

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Evening chaps, picked up Air Strike! and Close Quarters(CQ) at vapnartak the other week and had a bit of a peruse and a play through of the new rules. Today is the turn of Air Strike! (AS) to go under the lens. Overall this book feels vastly more fleshed out as a ruleset than CQ. CQ felt more like a series of suggestions with some fleet lists chucked in whereas AS is a rules redux, Mig Alley/Korea, and ground attack all rolled into one. Basically, a new player could pick up AS, a squadron box, 3rd party measuring gear and be away without touching the core box. As seen in the pictures, the first few pages show the consolidation of the 3 separate books from the starter into one book. It cleanly collects all the info into one spot and clarifies a few bits along the way including turrets, traits, firepower, cards and such. It also gives some alternative options for managing cards too. The most contentious part here is the optional "heavy fighters" rule whic
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Close Quarters Review

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Morning chaps, at vapnartak the other week I picked up Air strike! and Close quarters expansions for Blood red skies and Cruel seas. I'll review both but for now, here's the rundown on Close Quarters. Firstly: Art. Its the same gorgeous layout as the main book and features lots of bright colourful pictures. it reads well and is a good depth of pages for an expansion (68) It is however an expansion, not a revised core book. for those of you out there who don't like the turning/torps/etc, none of that is changed here. Content: The book starts off with a "scenario generator" that allows you to play pickup games. By default it wants you to roll for everything off of a million bazillion tables which is gonna get old pretty quickly. The victory conditions and force generators are gonna be good for "generic games" though and the mode is definitely welcome even if it is highly unlikely to make for "balanced" games between mates. It then mov
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Air strike beta test

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Long time, no write! So things have been crazy with the 2nd kid and gaming time has been diverted to an Aristeia league and an Infinity campaign recently but I'm back on the planes for a while. For those of you in the know, Air Strike! is an upcoming expansion for Blood Red Skies, focussing on ground attack. Andy Chambers and Ken Natt on the Ready room have put out a chunk of the new stuff in beta form to whet a few whistles. My local opponent John came over for a test-game and we rocked a brits vs germans early-ish war naval attack. Brits deploy 18" away; mossies to left, hurris to centre and left As there are no scenarios or guidelines for force composition so far, we eyeballed it a bit based on engine numbers and my previous experience with homebrewing it. The attacking force were the germans, rocking x6 Stuka divebombers (R3 pilots) and escorted by 3 durable 110c's with R3 and R4 pilots. They deployed 18" away from the targets, giving them a couple of tur
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Breaking the game!

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Last night one of the loca players, John, set an interesting challenge. He felt he'd found a nigh-unbeatable game-breaking squadron for 500points and my task was to try and beat it to prove him wrong! The build he's gone for surprisingly is the defiant in a massive rookie horde of 12. It comes in a shade under 500 points and utilises the following cards: He'd also taken one of the new cards (supply shortages) which immediately gave me a boom chit (which is massive vs small numbers of twin engine planes, it meant he only had to shoot down one plane to bug me out). As this is a "remove" card in the deployment phase, he only ever had these three cards in hand, immediately drawing back up whatever he had used because the defiants have no native traits other than the always-on "sluggish". The key thinking behind the defiant horde is thus: there's huge amounts of them, with FP2 360 turrets that attacking them from any angle gets you shot back. int
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Pacific war update and Japanese sneak peek!

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NEW NEWS!!! Hi guys, been a while since I wrote much for BRS, been a long run of Infinity and Aristeia this spring! I'm all queued up for a return to historical gaming this summer though and plan to get going with the D-Day campaign warlord are currently running: D-Day campaign In the run up to this, I've got my mitts on the American card update pack and one of the corsair aces to get the official card for my AiM corsair squadron (I've been using the beta one so far). I'm happy with the metal corsair model, the fuselage is a lot skinnier than the AiM model but the wing angles look more convincing than the AiM resins do versus the pictures I've seen and the panel detail is crisp on the metals and should hold its detail really well. They also come with underwing rockets which is a nice touch and I guess will feature in the upcoming "Air Strike" rules due out this year. Phillip Kirkwood looks like a solid addition to a corsair squadron; he gets a nice
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Converting 3rd party or improving metal planes to BRS stands

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So after a brief hiatus for christmas and other game systems (Infinity and Cruel Seas) the time has come to get back to doing my BRS backlog! I recently got a haul of plastic (resin) crack from the US (armaments in miniature) to add to my growing pile of to-assemble so I thought I'd make a start on it. I got x3 of the Ki48 for my Japanese, stopping them from being too reliant on the four engine H8K's I've got which are a bit unwieldy in smaller games. I also got x6 p38's which don't have a beta card as yet though Ken Natt and Andy Chambers are testing the p38E with the following: USA P-38 E Lightning 1941, Speed 8 (395mph) Agility 2, Firepower 2, Multi engine (2), Tight Turn, Heavy Hitter, Agile, 60 points A few chaps asked me about the build/conversion process for the AiM planes so here we go: Step 1) Small cross-headed screwdriver Remove the screw. On a lot of the AiM planes, the resin around the screw usually comes off clean with it. Light pressure wit
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