"Mustangs and Messerschmitts rule availability? Alternatives?" Topic

Talk about being late to the party, but I am trying to scratch an itch for a good fighter based game, and this really looks to fit the bill.

My desire stems from a love of World War II air combat, and also having a massive, expansive open outdoor space to use (several acres worth actually). I am so happy with the size of this space, I had actually planned on converting for use with 1/48 scale models.

Now, that said, finding these rules seems problematic at best. Has anyone picked up the rights to publish, or is the late Rocky's work just unavailable at this point?

Are there any other rule sets available that fall into the same category for hexless, large area play with bigger models (1/72 or larger)?

Thanks in advance.

Unavailable. The SLC gaming group is desultorily working on "Triplane". That is the game that we play because of the small gamer participation (and some of us don't want to play anything other than WW1, guilty as charged). Progress on the editing of "Triplane" is seemingly feckless. There just isn't any "fire" lit under anyone.

M&M needs an overhaul as well. But that project is even less likely anytime soon. Meanwhile, nobody else has "picked up the rights to publish"….

I think I've got a copy somewhere. PM me if you're interested.

As an alternative, Basic and Advanced Fighter Combat are still available from Lou Zocchi.

Great game if you have the room.

I remember someone made a variant for WWI in California in the 90s as well as jet age.

I wonder where I put all of that stuff?

You might also give a look at Mustangs. The only AH board game shows up on eBay occasionally, and the rules are kept alive here:

warflag.com/mustangs

Doug

hey I have played M&M maybe a 100 times.

I have a few copies of the rules and maybe a photocopy as well.

I also have triplane in its last printing that includes canvs falcons which is their Spanish civ war period rules. Also I have the korea exspansion for M&M.

I actually have all three published versions of M&M that I know of. Not sure if they published any other versions.

my email is kellisnc@msn.com

I did have rocky's contact info and phone number, he was married so I suppose the rules set is lost as far as publishing or republishing goes.

main thing is with M&M its really really hard to learn it, by reading the rules

you have to put planes to poles and just start working it out, really helpful if you have an experienced player to teach it

we used to run it at southern front in Raleigh where we'd pair a guy with a newbie or inexperienced player to speed things along

@ken: "really hard to learn the rules by reading the rules". True story! Even the designers did not successfully refer to the rules to resolve issues. As recently as the last couple of months, the old boys of the original playtest group in SLC (including yours truly) bogged down searching the much smaller and simpler "Triplane" rules for answers to such basic things as jamming machineguns by period, or to find "wisdom" on how to interpret the number of missions per period and how many months a seriously wounded pilot loses, and translate that into missions lost. Most of the time we don't find what we are looking for when we need it. And if we do find "it", the information is scanty or contradicts "tradition", i.e. how we've been doing it all these years.

In short, the rules are poorly written and organized. It really does take an experienced player to teach them….

when we played regularly I had the falcon set, and the new set and could call rocky on a really limited fashion

most times Id get my question answered, but then have to undergo a seminar on p-51 wing sealing or engine supercharger pressures or somesuch!

I met Steve Bradfield at an early Columbus origins where me and my cousin were set to play. Had a great convo up to the point where he said the had "all kinds of house rules"!!!! ! the ffin rules super stress that no house rules allowed! that way everybody is on the same page at a con

well it came to pass after a while of talking to the locals they had a potful of house rules too, the biggest was the ffer in charge of the game was pissed that origins scheduling staff didn't give him his slot he wanted so he was at home hung over and half drunk and 2 hours late already for the 9am game he was supposed to be running

hence he got an EPIC earful of redneck cussing out and we passed on the game, the best part, we met a great guy from Hawaii that was a player and I got to sell him some stuff over the year and I got to see SB's suitcase full of planes!

at that time there were two M&M groups in or near Columbus, one a house rules group and the other a straight up rules group

anyway when we played regularly I was really really up on the rules, chapter and verse, I made cheat sheets from the older falcon set with the maneuver diagrams and fire charts – and we even got to regularly playing and teaching the full blown speed loss\energy\maneuver rules

I never got rocky to deliver on his Vietnam stuff because he said no one could understand it if he didn't teach it!

BUT we did run at southern front a mig alley game one time! the Korean set and at the building we had some Syria middle east games with jets

the falcon rules did explain in Ok fashion the missions per period and missions lost

basically if you got wounded it would give you a framework of how many months you'd miss

so, if the period was X months long you'd just prorate how many missions were available in the period, subtract the number of average missions per month and see if you were over for the period or if your wounds extended into the next period

piece of cake right?

say you are pilot x in the sitzkrieg, you get wounded on misson one, most likely you are out till a later period

of course you have to factor in theatre changes, etc. it isn't all spelled out totally but the framework is sound, the falcon rules were horribly organized and the lack of an index or table of contents was the killer

the third edition, had better artwork, and some rewriting and maybe a bit better organized, most importantly they did fix many typos but not all

the best thing maybe about third was they trimmed the tomelike length of the rules by better organizing the plane stat lists

still, some info is pretty cryptic, peeps get all excited to shoot massive ordnance out of some planes in contravention of the intent, they see some bigass gun thinking they can lay waste to enemy planes when that gun position might be a bunker buster or tank buster cannon, slow rate of fire, limited ammo etc and shuddering impact on the firing plane when then thing shoots!

yea I talked to rocky way too many times…..rip!

spent half an hour one time with him telling me about some top secret wing thing ( at the time ) where the ailerons on a p-51 were linked to the wings along the length by a canvas or some king of fabric deal where the cloth blocked air from circulating or being trapped in between the surfaces, this resulted in about a net 3hp gain in effective engine power because of drag reduction

wind tunnel s**t I guess? think what the engineers in nascar could do with a plane!

I'd like a copy of these as well too.

Sent an e-mail to Ken, and posted on the M&M Yahoo Group, but no joy yet.