Blood Red Skies

I finally managed a proper game of Blood Red Skies this week.  Checking back on the blog I discovered that I bought the starter set 4 years ago but they've never seen action!

I'd played one game of this at the Guildford club back in 2018... it was a large multiplayer version which didn't use all the rules if I remember correctly.  I was impressed though and promptly picked up a copy of the starter set.  I'd painted up the planes that come with this but never completed them.  The original starter box came with some rather naff stickers for roundels and crosses rather than proper decals and I never got round to acquiring the proper ones until recently.  

I spent the weekend swearing loudly at the set of Spitfire and Me109 decals that I'd bought but managed to get them mostly applied safely (as long as you don't look too close... there are 6 planes and 7 sets of decals so you only get 1 chance to mess up!).  I'm pleased when the results though...

Incidentally when I discovered that the Warlord Games decals are for 602 City of Glasgow Squadron I was sold... I hadn't realised that they still exist (now as a RAAF squadron) and are based about a mile or so from my old home in Glasgow.

The game avoids the complications that often come with air games... altitude bands, complicated manouvers etc... by using stands which can be angled backwards as though the plane is climbing (to show 'advantage') or angled downwards (to show 'disadvantage').  This neatly simplifies all the height issues and advantage can be used to increase speed or manouvreability. 

 

Hits from firing are quite hard to achieve and it's even harder to actually cause damage.  A successful hit forces a plane to a lower advantage status and a disadvantaged plane which is hit is then shot down.  More importantly a successful hit, even if it causes no damage, inflicts a 'boom chit' on the victim (terrible terminology!).  Once you have more 'boom chits' than planes the squadron turns tail and flees, which feels right... driving off enemy planes was a more accurate result than everyone being shot down.

Each side also has a selection of cards based on the type of plane, the period of the war and the theatre which add some extra depth.

Our game pitted 4 Spitfires against 4 Me109s in a straightforward encounter scenario.  The game rewards spending some time manoeuvring and positioning to get onto the tail of your opponent and the tight turn of the Spitfire proved really effective at this.  It also pays to have a wingman who can soften up an opponent and force them to a disadvantaged state before their partner moves in for the kill.

I was really pleased with how they played and will definitely use them again... it's fair to say my opponent was less impressed (despite winning) and found the mechanics harder to get to grips with but I guess that's the nature of wargames... we all have different tastes.

Wingspan

 

A rare family boardgame evening with a game of Wingspan.  I've posted about this before but essentially it's an engine-building game based on birds... think Terraforming Mars but with feathers.  Its certainly less complex than TM but that's no bad thing when you want a quick game to distract from all the Royal funeral stuff.

The components are lovely and any game that includes a dice tower shaped like a birdhouse is a winner in my book!

Each round (4 in total) has a randomly drawn objective (eg most birds played in the woodland habitat or most eggs laid etc) and each player has a secret objective as well so each game has a lot of variety.

As usual I was soundly beaten by my wife and son with Elaine doing her usual "oh I don't really know what I'm doing" shtick while wiping the floor with us!

Blam! Blam! Aargh!

 

Last night we played a game using these free skirmish rules which came with a recent issue of Wargames Illustrated.  I missed this completely... to be honest I rarely buy any magazines these days after years of faithfully being them.  I'm rarely in a High Street to pick up a copy on spec and when I have bought magazines I've really only flicked through them.  Luckily my friend Anthony is a bit more alert and had spotted these rules.

BBA (I can't say I'm a  fan of the name) are written by Dan Mersey  so sounded promising and have a good pedigree. They seem to be designed for a broad range of periods...certainly from the 18th Century onwards and are covered much aimed at small skirmishes with a handful of figures.  Each turn has 4 action phases and players bid for initiative from a pool of Initiave Points.  As you lose figures this pool decreases.  The winner of the bid chooses one of 4 actions: move, shoot, fight or recover from stun.  

An interesting mechanism is that the opposing player then has to do the same action (but with half the number of figures that the active player used) so if the active player chooses to move, the other player then can only opt to move figures and not, for example, shoot.  At first I thought this was a very odd approach but it actually works well in practice and means choosing when to try and win initiative (or not) becomes really critical.

We played a WW2 scenario with some very nice 42mm figures from Irregular Miniatures (... must resist looking at their website...!!)

We had 2 evenly matched forces with mainly rifles, a squad MG and a leader with a SMG.  My riflemen and leader quickly headed into the cover of the woods and waited for the enemy to act.  There are definitely times where you don't want to win initiative, letting your opponent use up his points and then controlling the later phases and this tactic proved pretty deadly.  I managed to sucker Anthony into overspending his Initiative Points which left his troops stranded in the open and under a deadly hail of fire.

They tried their best to get into the cover of the farmhouse but were now coming fire from all sides and, of course, as figures began to be killed the IP pool was also dwindling, making to harder to win initiative.  From then on it was clear that the British weren't going to last long.

They're an interesting set of rules... obviously they're pretty simplified and short but that's no bad thing.  It'd be interesting to see what they're like with other periods and more complex scenarios.

Colours 2022

 A trip to Colours at Newbury this weekend for the first time in 4 years.  It's a great show and, at about an hour and a half's drive is one of the closest (apart from Salute and SELWG although the latter's move to North London makes it tricky to get to now).

Arriving at the car park it was clear it was already very busy at 10.30am and inside the main hall it was pretty packed.  On the top floor the Bring and Buy was several people deep and I didn't have the enthusiasm to elbow my way to the front so I don't know of there were any bargains to be had.

There weren't a huge number of games on show... Colours always feels very much like a trade show and I only took a few pics of some that caught my eye

Battle of Adrianople

Mordheim

Roundway Down

Peter Pig's Mexican Revolution game...always been tempted by this period but no!

My haul from the show was also very restrained... a copy of Strength and Honour which I wanted to try with my 10mm Romans and Celts, and a set of Mig Alley which is part of the Wings at War series from Tumbling Dice and comes with some teeny, tiny 1:600 Jets.  I've always  fancied the Korean air war and at £10 it seemed too good to pass up...