Warbirds in Miniature at Historicon mini AAR
The Battle Barn gamers GM'd two games of Warbirds in Miniature at Historicon 2008.
The first was a "pick-up" game Friday night we called; Fighter Sweep during the Battle of Britain (BoB). John did not bring his hand painted BoB map so we played on my plastic hex map I keep folded in my dice box. We had 7 players during the game with at one time 12 planes in th air. ME-109s' and 110's vs Hurricanes and Spitfires. As in my last two games one of my pilots aborted his mission after only 3 turns; this after taking his first light hit! In this game the Lt Hit caused a Wounded Pilot check in which I passed but then managed to fail my morale test.
The second pilot on or about turn 6 found his Spitfire so shot up I volunteered him to leave combat.
The Germans won the Battle of Britain game by sweeping the skies and forcing 5 British planes to abort for a loss of only one shot down ME 109 and one aborted ME-109 who later crashed into the channel and became MIA.
The premier game for the Battle Barn was our "Air war over Russia 1942." John brought his hand painted hex map of the Russian front. We had 12 players for a total of 22 fighters. each player flew two fighters. John commanded the 7 Stuka's. The Germans had ME-109s, ME-110s and FW 190's.
The Russians flew MIG- 1s, Yak- 1s, Yak- 9s, LN 5's, P-39s and PE-2s. Seven of the players were first timers. I will not go into details here knowing that John will soon write a formal AAR on the battle…But it was it was a blast!
Planes were everywhere, and ME-109 collided into a ME110, 0nly the 110 survived this collision!
In the end the Stuka's managed to successfully bomb and destroy the targeted railhead, but 4 of the 7 dive bombers went down returning to their bases. In the end over 14 planes were shot down.
I do not want to praise my-self (yes I do)but both of my PE-2 survived the game even though both were shot up and had damaged controls. One of them even finished off a shot up Stuka to claim a kill. And both rear gunners rec'd a ½ kill when the both shot and killed a ME-109 zeroing down on my wingmans tail.
We had plenty of spectators during both games who gave us loads of compliments on our games the planes them selves and Johns awsome game map.
The vendor for of Luftwaffe 1946 spent about an hour talking to us about the planes, most of them in which are Luftwaffe 1946 miniatures, the game and map board. I felt he was very impressed with the game itself and the Battle Barn gamers!
A BIG thanks goes out to Battle Barn members, Gunny Phil, Malcolm, JD and his son Patrick for their help during both games.
We will post a formal AAR on the Battle Barn web site soon…hopefully with a few photos. We had some photography problems but one of the players took a few and said he will share them.
Ron
paints up some WWII Soviet aircraft.
