Open day tournament, ground attack beta and Cruel Seas
Open day tournament and Bombing rules test
Today started with a bit of a drama with getting to warlord on time (damn bendy credit cards and their flimsy chips!) but we soon got underway with a small tournament which settled me down a touch.
My first round was against a lovely chap called james who had horrible dice right throughout!
The board was lovely, looked like a deepcut mat and some home made cliffs. I'd taken my British mustang mkiv's, 5 of them. ratings 4,3,3,3,3 for pilots which worked nicely to 495 points.
James had taken mkii spitfires, pilot skills 5,5,2,2,2,2 and immediately I was wary of the outmaneuvres to come from the enemy aces, but looking forward to being able to bully the plentiful rookies for boom chits.
I split my wings 3/2 with the R4 pilot taking the right flank and the 3 3's taking the left.
Radar support, superior armament and low altitude were the cards I'd chosen. The traits I used were x3 deep pockets and x2 great dive.
Pass 1 began with the majority of my guys in advantage thanks to radar support, my wing of threes took a sitter of an opportunity by great diving over the cliffs and picking on a disadvatanged rookie, hammering him with deflection shots and racking up 3 chits in the first 5 minutes. The retaliation was swift in pass 2 but thankfully due to a largely small rookie dicepool and deep pockets, any shots that did land were "deep pocketed" and ignored. all my guys then booted for the cloud cover adn then promptly hammered into the other set of 2's to rack up another 3 chits. We had to call it there to dash off to the BRS talk with Andy Chambers.
Game two was against Ken Natt
Same board, different opponent! He used Yaks which i've never even seen , let alone played against.
He'd got an awful lot of experienced pilots (including the named ace, Lydia). He'd taken the radar support card as I had to mitigate the "poor quality" trait and smashed in aggressive tactics with his fistful of tight turns which i'd not seen before and is a brutal combination as it means you don't discard the doctrine!! It seems a very powerful card for tournament play on spits and yaks given nigh-continuous usage that a stack of tight turns provides.
It was a very tight and defensive game with lots of "cloud dancing" going on as neither of us really wanted to get tailed and shot up by experienced pilots with big dicepools. very little happened for several passes on the left flank but my three R3 pilots got stuck in on the right flank and experienced exactly what troubled James in his first game. several rounds of shots and failed outmaneuver actions meant that after an hour and twenty mins neither of us had even scored a chit on the other.
The afternoon was cracking on so we agreed to end the game at the end of that turn and as a last ditch attempt my R3 managed to get into a head-to-head with a yak, both inflicted a chit on the other but I had a "deep pocket" card in hand, winning the game on a massive and glorious 1 chit to 0.
This cagey game and flukey win put me on 2 wins which sealed the inaugural event in my name.
As we were playing, some test shots of sprues were handed around for the players (as were test sprues and miscasts for the guys playing cruel seas!) and I came home with a tester mosquito:
As a miscast there are a few problems with it but apparently its pretty representative of the final product. It'll be getting drilled out for a hawk widget as the base connector is too small (which is why this batch were rejected)
My winner's prize is another box of these beauties so I'm looking forward to receiving those in the post!
Breaking the box:
We all got to help test out some of the rules for the upcoming ground attack mission set
and we got to play with these beauties!!
the scenario we were testing was a much more involved "escort duty" mission played at high altitude (>20k ft). It imposed problems with climbing for the interceptors and introduced ground flak barrages and bombing targets. Every turn the defenders rolled dice and the results alternated between more fighters (they basically respawn in high cover once killed) and flak barrages of varying sizes. These aren't great for the bombers to stray into, knocking them off-course and damaging them. Heavy flak only affected advantaged and neutral planes, light flak only affects disad planes. The weapon pods we used had a downside as well as an upside and brought a bit more flavour but needed a few tweaks to get them slicker. Rockets, guns and a few other bits are on the cards at present.
The targets have traits and one or more damage tracks, some being vulnerable to heavy bombs, some to strafing attacks and some to both.
Rocket pods, gun pods and other attachable equipment were trialled as cards to rotate in
along with some new doctrines and such specialised for the new scenarios. In true "game test" style, we broke the game and raised a few kinks to be ironed out but on the whole it looks excellent and is gonna work really well with a bit more polish.
I was most excited when Andy Chambers confirmed he's already made target cards for shipping!!
The bombers broke through the defending fighters and unleashed their bombloads on the targets (glued to cereal boxes in true blue peter style) and navigated heavy flak batteries (which accounted for the blown out engines on the middle bomber as pictured!)
I'm really looking forward to the next iteration of the beta test rules which Andy and Ken had said today that they'll stick up on the Ready Room page for input "soon-ish".
Lastly, I had a good look at the Cruel Seas preview.
OMG.
Gorgeous.
It works on 1:300 scale and already has some air cover built in (which is oing to feed into plane production for BRS with a bit of upscaling). Its a d10 based system with dice draw for initiative like Antares/Bolt Action and looked a lot of fun though you'll need some mental maths or a calculator for totting up damage, the freighter I saw had 85HP and your damage inflicted is the total sum of your dice roll. the chap launching torpedos at it literrally rolled a fistful of dice on his damage roll for a single torpedo and had to think about the maths for more than a second or two!
I highly recommend heading down next time, I had a really good day and it looked like everyone else did too!
Also treated myself to a box of the new wildcats and an ace to accompany them :-)
Today started with a bit of a drama with getting to warlord on time (damn bendy credit cards and their flimsy chips!) but we soon got underway with a small tournament which settled me down a touch.
My first round was against a lovely chap called james who had horrible dice right throughout!
James had taken mkii spitfires, pilot skills 5,5,2,2,2,2 and immediately I was wary of the outmaneuvres to come from the enemy aces, but looking forward to being able to bully the plentiful rookies for boom chits.
I split my wings 3/2 with the R4 pilot taking the right flank and the 3 3's taking the left.
Radar support, superior armament and low altitude were the cards I'd chosen. The traits I used were x3 deep pockets and x2 great dive.
Pass 1 began with the majority of my guys in advantage thanks to radar support, my wing of threes took a sitter of an opportunity by great diving over the cliffs and picking on a disadvatanged rookie, hammering him with deflection shots and racking up 3 chits in the first 5 minutes. The retaliation was swift in pass 2 but thankfully due to a largely small rookie dicepool and deep pockets, any shots that did land were "deep pocketed" and ignored. all my guys then booted for the cloud cover adn then promptly hammered into the other set of 2's to rack up another 3 chits. We had to call it there to dash off to the BRS talk with Andy Chambers.
Game two was against Ken Natt
He'd got an awful lot of experienced pilots (including the named ace, Lydia). He'd taken the radar support card as I had to mitigate the "poor quality" trait and smashed in aggressive tactics with his fistful of tight turns which i'd not seen before and is a brutal combination as it means you don't discard the doctrine!! It seems a very powerful card for tournament play on spits and yaks given nigh-continuous usage that a stack of tight turns provides.
It was a very tight and defensive game with lots of "cloud dancing" going on as neither of us really wanted to get tailed and shot up by experienced pilots with big dicepools. very little happened for several passes on the left flank but my three R3 pilots got stuck in on the right flank and experienced exactly what troubled James in his first game. several rounds of shots and failed outmaneuver actions meant that after an hour and twenty mins neither of us had even scored a chit on the other.
The afternoon was cracking on so we agreed to end the game at the end of that turn and as a last ditch attempt my R3 managed to get into a head-to-head with a yak, both inflicted a chit on the other but I had a "deep pocket" card in hand, winning the game on a massive and glorious 1 chit to 0.
This cagey game and flukey win put me on 2 wins which sealed the inaugural event in my name.
As we were playing, some test shots of sprues were handed around for the players (as were test sprues and miscasts for the guys playing cruel seas!) and I came home with a tester mosquito:
My winner's prize is another box of these beauties so I'm looking forward to receiving those in the post!
Breaking the box:
We all got to help test out some of the rules for the upcoming ground attack mission set
the scenario we were testing was a much more involved "escort duty" mission played at high altitude (>20k ft). It imposed problems with climbing for the interceptors and introduced ground flak barrages and bombing targets. Every turn the defenders rolled dice and the results alternated between more fighters (they basically respawn in high cover once killed) and flak barrages of varying sizes. These aren't great for the bombers to stray into, knocking them off-course and damaging them. Heavy flak only affected advantaged and neutral planes, light flak only affects disad planes. The weapon pods we used had a downside as well as an upside and brought a bit more flavour but needed a few tweaks to get them slicker. Rockets, guns and a few other bits are on the cards at present.
The targets have traits and one or more damage tracks, some being vulnerable to heavy bombs, some to strafing attacks and some to both.
Rocket pods, gun pods and other attachable equipment were trialled as cards to rotate in
I was most excited when Andy Chambers confirmed he's already made target cards for shipping!!
I'm really looking forward to the next iteration of the beta test rules which Andy and Ken had said today that they'll stick up on the Ready Room page for input "soon-ish".
Lastly, I had a good look at the Cruel Seas preview.
OMG.
Gorgeous.
I highly recommend heading down next time, I had a really good day and it looked like everyone else did too!
Also treated myself to a box of the new wildcats and an ace to accompany them :-)
Just picked up a starter set of BRS a week or so ago. I wasn't sure I would like it, but I have to say it does a good job of simulating air combat with lots of planes but not a lot of bookkeepping. I've ordered a set of JU-88 bombers. Not sure what I might buy after that - I could see some Hurricanes or some Yak-1s for instance.
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