"BAG THE HUN: WW2 Aerial Combat Rules - A Review" Topic

BAG THE HUN
Battle of Britain Edition
Reviewed by Mark Hannam

With Bag The Hun, Nick Skinner has managed to create an elegant, sleek machine drawn from the essentials of aerial combat in WW2. whilst the game is designed with the Battle of Britain in mind, it can of course be used for any aerial combat of the propeller era.

This is not a cardboard flight simulator. There are no chit covered dials or throttle tracks to distract your focus from the tabletop. Subsequently, the game moves at a much faster tempo than most other aerial combat games.

This, and the unpredictable nature of the game turns, injects tension, excitement and above all fun, into what used to be a dreary genre of "eyes down, calculate, push a plane on a stick".

Learning the rules takes one read through, and with the aid of Bag The Hun's detailed playsheets, you can be hosting exciting dogfights with your usual opponents or any 'Johnny No-Games' who happen to turn up at the club.

But what of the actual game mechanics?

First of all and most importantly, you will require a hex playing surface to play the game. Individual model aircraft are organised into sections/schwarms & flights and use the hexes for judging movement/combat distances, determining the effects of maneouvres and the plane's current actual aspect.

As you might expect, each make & type of aircraft has it's own unique set of 'Aircraft Characteristics'. There are seven; Speed, Maneouvrability, Max. Altitude, Rate of Climb, Robustness, Size and finally, Weapons.

The man maketh the machine, and so a further crucial factor is 'Pilot Quality'. In Bag The Hun, it's more than just a +1 on a die roll. Aces really do have an extra card up their sleeve.

Altitude, the bane of every aerial wargamer is reduced into 6 range bands which are handily represented by the pips on a small die placed next to the model aircraft stand. Sort of 'Angels d6' if you will.

Turns. Anyone familiar with Too Fat Lardies and their company level WW2 rules, I Ain't Been Shot Mum, will find no surprises here. The individual turn sequence is determined by cards which break up the predictive & sterile nature of the more usual "you go, I go" game turn. Each flight section/Schwarm has it's own Move and Fire cards. Further Bonus cards are included for Aces, Altitude Advantage & Characters, all of which can help provide a realistic edge in combat.

The 'Hun in the sun' is easily recreated with another old favourite of Too Fat Lardies, 'Blinds'. Blinds help introduce uncertainty and the fog of war into games which otherwise display everything in the shop window.

Movement, simple and elogant with pre-defined aerial maneouvres (these appear on Quick Reference sheets). There are mechanics for getting onto an opponents tail, and again for staying there.

The Actual air to air combat itself. That's what you've been waiting for.

The attacker rolls a number of dice equal to his fire factor + length of burst + luck modifier + target size. How many of those dice hit and what damage they do is judged by the target's maneouvrability + range + his luck. Minor damage is quickly dealt with, whilst critical damage is satisfyingly detailed, including a chart for the effects of wounds on the pilot. Can you fly the plane back to the airstrip before you black out?

Short sections on Flak and Bombing just about wrap things up. The two appendices included contain aircraft details for the Battle of Britain and an aircraft record sheet which can be reproduced for game use.

Two excellent A4 Quick Reference pages which can be mounted back to back complete the package.

All in all, you will find that Bag The Hun actually plays like just so many of those personal accounts of aerial combat from the Battle of Britain. And it can't be bad for that.

Chocks Away! Angels D6! Dakka...Dakka...Dakka....

Bag The Hun
£8.00 GBP hard copy or £5.00 GBP PDF direct to your email

Available from:
Too Fat Lardies
toofatlardies.co.uk

Thanks for the detailed review, Mark. Very nice of you to do that.
Only one plane is allowed per hex, I assume?
Can it be played with 1/300 scale planes?

I'm just getting started with BTH as well.... Planes can occupy the same hex, but have some risk of a mid-air if in the same altitude band. 1/300 is the "standard" plane size, although a few of the chaps on the lardies list (myself included) are increasingly becoming 1/600 converts....

Dom.

Great review.

After decades of attempting WWII aerial combat miniatures games and weeping over the results, I may have to dig down and get these.

Hi

1/300th are fine, but I do recommend the Tumbling Dice 1/600th range. Excellent little models which have enough detail to treat each plane as a 'character' whilst also a more suitabe scale for anti-shipping operations.

Mark

VIVA LA 1/600's!!!

Yep, the 1/600 are way cheaper and pretty nice. I use some 1/700 as well.
Thanks,

John

Get the "Greece" scenario book recently put out.....it has a "Bag the Hun" campaign....fabulous stuff! Tally ho!

Thanks for the great review. I may be inclined to purchase a copy.

I prefer to game pacific air battles. Will the Battle of Britain set give me enough info to go off and do this?

Thanks for the review, Mark.

Rat of Tobruk - I know of plenty of guys who use the rules for later war actions in all theatres. The rules give aircraft stats for Battle of Britain aircraft, but we included a load of other stats in the Toofatlardies Christmas Special (including Pacific War aircraft).

If there are any specif aircraft you're looking for that we haven't got covered then shout out on the Toofatlardies Yahoo discussion group.

Just to second Nick's comment, the TFL discussion group is a very lively and helpful one. As it happens I'm slowly working through Pacific aircraft stats for my own games, which are in the files section of the group. Not too many at the moment, but I've got a reasonable number of Japanese types up, including all of the Zero and Oscar variants. I'm happy to look at any specific requests if you do decide to use the rules.

Dom. (Not a Lardy, but a big fan....)

Thanks for the review, I have been waiting for something like that.

How many planes do you normally use per side?
How big a hexmap do you need?

Does Tumbling Dicea have a web site?

Dom. I might jump in on the group. The three main fighter types I am interested in are the Zero, Boomerang, and Kittyhawk.

Belkor

In our games we use anywhere between three or four planes per side for a smallish dogfight, up to a dozen (or maybe more?) aside for a bigger bash.

Our hex sheet is six by four feet, we played a game a couple of weeks ago with about thirty planes on that, and had ample room.

Cheers

Richard

I haven't gotten around to the Commonwealth Stick yet, but the Zero (all marks) and the Kittyhawk (Es and Ns; I assume it's Aussies that interest you, so that'll cover it) are in the files section of the group.

Dom.

Update; the Boomerang's now in there as well....

Where do you get 1/300 World War 1 planes? I have never seen these.

I really like IABSM and have been thinking about getting this so I'm glad for the summary/press release or whatever this is. But it's not a review.

jkantor, I thought it was a very good and comprehensive review. How is it not a review?

jkantor

That wasn't a summary/press release, that was a review. Mark paid cash for the rules, and told us what he thought about them. I'm grateful to him for that. If we wanted to do a press release it would have our name on it.

Cheers

Rich

Sounds like just what I'm looking for.

Will it destroy the game if I insist on not using hexes? (i.e. measure equivalent distances) I'll also use adjustable stands for height but that won't be a problem.

Also, do you have data for: Fokker D.XXI, Brewster B-329, Fiat G-50? (I'm doing Russo Finnish War). Any rules for different types of weather? (Okay, tell me to stop being lazy and write them myself!)

LOL I just happen to have the rules in front of me and there are stats for the G-50,Fokker D.XXI and The Buffalo B-239. :) Robert

I played Bag the Hun for the first time this weekend and I must say I was disappointed. The rules are not hard to learn, but suffer from the same defects that so many card driven games suffer from. Sometimes players can defy physics and fly twice in the same turn. And you can line yourself up for a perfect shot but can't fire because you can only fire when a card is drawn. Silly stuff.

Light Horseman – I think you have missed the reasons for the abstractions. BtH aims to create plausible historical outcomes and does not try to simulate the detail of WW2 air combat in every literal respect. The ability of some pilots to move twice (or more) in the same turn is not about suspending the laws of physics. The mechanism is used to achieve an end result, e.g. a bounce, where an experienced or ace pilot might attack and shoot down an unsuspecting sprog seemingly from out of nowhere, or prove impossible to shake off ("he was all over me and I couldn't get him off my tail whichever way I turned").

The card sequence is intended to recreate the unpredictability of WW2 dogfighting, the speed at which events unfolded and the fleeting opportunity to get off a shot. It is a counter to the all-seeing eye of a wargamer lining up a tempting target without having to worry about other enemy planes which he can see are too far away to be a threat. In my view that type of situation is far less realistic that the outcome BtH is able to achieve as I'm sure no actual pilot of the era could be 100% sure he had the positions of every enemy aircraft accurately fixed when closing in for the kill.

The rules may not be to your taste, but to dismiss them as silly stuff misses the point and is unfair to the author.

Played them last night and I really wanted to enjoy them but I found the card activation difficult (and I like some card activation card games!!!)

I think it doesn't hurt that my head was full of CY6 so I was making comparisons.

I found the shooting very difficult, though I could understand why it was so.

I do need to play it again and give it another chance as I do so want to love it.

The card activation is awesome. I've just about sworn off IGOUGO rules, they just don't have the right feel to me now. Every commander's/pilot's best laid plans gets jacked by events completely out of their control and the sequence of the cards reflects this quite nicely.

A pilot's description of a dogfight:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight

Pulling up into his blind spot I watched his plane grow larger and larger in my sight. But this German pilot was not content to fly straight and level. Before I could open fire his plane slewed to the right, and seeing me on his tail, he jerked back on the stick into the only defensive maneuver his plane could make. I banked my 47 over to the right and pulled back on the stick, striving to get him once more into my ring sight. The violent maneuver applied terrific G's to my body, and I started to black out as the blood rushed from my head. Fighting every second to overcome this blackness about me, I pulled back on the stick, further and further, so that the enemy would just show at the bottom of my ring sight to allow for the correct deflection. We were both flying in a tight circle. Just a little more and I'll have him. Pressing the [trigger] I waited expectantly for the 109 to explode. I've hit his wing. A section two-feet long broke loose from the right wing as the machine gun cut like a machete through it. Too low, a little more rudder and the bullets will find his cockpit. I could see occasional strikes further up the wing, but it was too late. The 109, sensing that I was inside him on the turn, slunk into a nearby cloud. Straightening my plane, I climbed over the top of the bank, and poised on the other side, waiting for him to appear. But the 109 did not appear, and not wishing to tempt the gods of fate further, I pushed my stick forward, entered the protective cover of the clouds, and headed home.[16]

Getting in position doesn't mean you get a shot. There's not much time covered in a game of BtH. I recall reading or hearing somewhere that dogfights didn't last 10 minutes most of the time, so an individual card draw is mere seconds.

Does this game only have info for battle of Britain or are theatres included. Primary interests are early Pacific and Med.

There's stats for most WWII aircraft and really good Med scenarios spread out in the Lard Specials. Convoy bombing, etc, etc, neat stuff.