Sorry, Charlie, Albacore are Airplanes!

We finally played a game of Check Your 6! that I've had in the works for about three years.  The planes have been mostly painted for about two years, and I finished them up a year or so ago, but never got them decaled and sprayed until this past weekend.  This scenario is a historic battle in which two Fairey Fulmars escorted six Fairey Albacore in an attack on an Italian battleship (don't remember now which one - I'd have to dig out the source and look it up again).  On the way to their target, they were intercepted by two Ju-88s.  I remember historically, the Fulmars beat off the Ju-88s, but I don't recall the results of the attack on the battleship. 


Perry and I flew the Albacore, Perry's son, Calvin, flew the Fulmars, and Doug took us all on with the Ju-88s.  Here's what happened in our refight of the battle:


The Ju-88s immediately turned towards the British squadron, while the Brits focused on the ship.  In the first pass, the Fulmars overflew the Germans, but fortunately remained undamaged - no harm, no foul.

While the Fulmars repositioned, the Ju-88s flew through the first section of Albacore, but drew no damage again.

The Fulmars got first blood with an engine hit on a Ju-88, which left the table at that point.  The Albacore are just about in position.

The first section of Albacore line up to drop their torpedoes.  The second Ju-88 took airframe damage, but flew on, hoping to take out an Albacore or two.  

The Albacore lined up to drop torpedoes.  They were too high and too fast coming in and actually had to overfly the ship and turn back in to drop.

One took an engine hit and had to jettison his torpedo before the attack run.

The Ju-88 tried to finish him off, but missed. 

In this turn or the next, the last Ju-88 took his second damage and was lost to the sea. 

The final torpedo launch.

In the end, five of the six Albacore were able to launch and the battleship took three hits, which we determined was enough to slow her down but not enough to sink her.  One Ju-88 was shot down and one was forced off the board with engine damage.  I think three, and maybe four, of the Albacore were hit, all by AA fire from the ship.  Neither of the Fulmars were hit.  I think we miscounted the AA and the Axis should have actually had an additional shot each turn.  It was a fun game - low and slow, but with lots of action. 


The planes are by Tumbling Dice.  Pretty much all of my WWII planes are 1/300, but I wasn't about to buy and assemble six Albacore in 1/300, so I went with the 1/600 for this game, at least.  Decals are from Dom's, of course!  The ship is GHQ 1/2400.  Doug didn't have any Italian battleships, so we substituted a Brit.  Shhhh!  Some of you might ask about the game mat.  It's home-made - marine vinyl with hexes marked out with Sharpie. 

Blockade Runners Come Home

We did a fairly large ACW naval game today that I have been planning for a long time.  The basic set up is that the Union is blockading the mouth of a river and receive intelligence that Confederate naval forces are on the move, heading downstream towards them.  The Union forces assume they Confederates are trying to break out of the blockade, but in reality, the Southerners are coming to escort a couple of blockade runners into to the river.  The board was set up as a large ox-bow with a small fort and some individual gun positions watching the river.  The Union had the Kearsarge and two Itasca/Unadilla-class 90-day gunboats, along with a pair of mortar schooners and the river gun positions.  The Confederates started with the Morgan, Gaines, General Moore, Nansemond and Hampton coming down the river.  Rolling randomly, the Alabama, Banshee and A D Vance entered from the ocean side on turn 7 or 8.  By then, the Union ships and the Confederate river flotilla had joined action. 

The Union patrol just off the coast.

The Confederate battle line rounding the ox-bow, with a small Union

fort on the point.

The Union mortar schooners, waiting for a target. 

 

Alabama, A D Vance and Banshee (r. to l.) entering the battlefield.

 

The battle became such a swirling mess that at this point, I couldn't even recap the highlights!  Everyone was shooting everywhere.  It was a tough slog for the Union, though.  The Confederates had more ships, but there was an even number of guns and the Union had a slight edge in weight of shot.  The Confederates were pretty confident from the beginning, but did become rather concerned when these little guys popped up on the table - three torpedo boats and their tender, an armed tugboat.  

 

The shot of the game probably came when one of the mortar schooners dropped a 13" shell right down Alabama's stack, demolishing her stack, cutting her speed in half and enveloping her in smoke for the duration of the game.  The schooners hit General Moore at least once as well. 

 

 

There was a lot of action and finally, towards the end of the game, ships started getting worn down to the point where damage was getting critical.  The Gaines was badly hit by the Kearsarge and the gunboats, to the point we thought it might sink or be forced to surrender from morale failure.  Neither happened.  The Nansemond surrendered to the armed tug a turn before the tug was sunk, and then was grounded on the shore.  One of the gunboats tried to cut off the General Moore, only to rammed and sunk.

 

 

The torpedo boats were unfortunately ineffectual.  One was sunk by gunfire.  The second was rammed and sunk.  The third made two attacks, missing with the first and the second was ruled a dud.  The A D Vance and the Banshee made it to the river none the worse for wear - the Vance had minimal damage, while the Banshee was in danger of being sunk.  If only the Union gunners in the fort hadn't been celebrating their victory a little prematurely they might have been able to do a little more damage as the Banshee screamed past.  Here, the Vance (left - one of its masts was accidentally knocked off) and the Banshee race of the safety of the pilings.  Banshee won by a nose with the last Union shot chasing them around the bend.  The Confederates had done a number on the gun positions, as well.  Two of the individual positions had been destroyed, and the small fort and remaining gun position were damaged. 

 

It was a fun - but LONG - fight.  Turned out to be about 8 hours of gaming or so.  I have two more ACW naval battles planned - neither as involved as this one, though hopefully as fun.  All of the models are from Thoroughbred except for the A D Vance, which is from Peter Pig.  We used Bay Area Yard's Under Both Flags rules, which, despite its flaws, we still find to be one of the most playable sets we've tried. 









A Few Ships on Commission

NOTE: This post is actually several months old.  Because of changes in my computer system and the geniuses at Microsoft, I haven't been able to post using my normal browser and have to use another one to access my blogs and post pics to them.

I've been really lazy about posting for the last several months.  The boy and I have been playing a lot more lately - his latest craze, actually, is chess.  He asked me to teach him about a few months ago and we've played several games since, not including several more games that he played against the computer. 

What I have to offer here, though, is a handful of 1/6000 ships that I painted on commission.  I wanted to try painting authentic camouflage on them and asked the owner if he minded if I played around with them.  Nope, play away, he said.  So I did. 

First up is the Arizona in pre-war camo and the Pennsylvania in the blue on blue camo she wore from '42 through '45.

Next there are two Japanese behemoths and some early carriers.  Not much camo on them, though.

Finally, we have the creme de la creme!  Here are the Chiyoda and the Chitose in their '44/'45 camo schemes as well as I could portray them in 1/6000!  They took a while, but I thought they turned out very nice!  

Hope you enjoy them!  I'm actually jealous - wish I had painted my own ships in this way.

Meanwhile, in the Channel...

So it's been a while since I've posted despite having two games in quick succession a month or so ago.  I'll post the first game here and the second game in a separate post.  Unfortunately at this point, I don't remember much of what happened in the first game except that everyone enjoyed it.  It was our second coastal game, but our first using Action Stations (for the first game, a few years ago, we used The Quick and the Dead).
 

We had a small German convoy, escorted by four R-boats, attempting to transit an area when they were accosted by a British patrol of two MGBs and two MTBs (below). 

 

The British came in from the German port quarter and in the initial exchanges of fire, a couple of the R-boats were damaged and forced to slow. 



 

 

This played havoc with maneuvering and timing, and resulted in the starboard R-boats not even really getting into the action aside from long range shots.  In the shot below, the good order R-boat is trying to pass the damaged one on the starboard, but can't get around it in time to affect the British attack.

 

 

In the end, the MTBs fired torpedoes at the freighters, which either missed or ran deep.  The port-side R-boats were in the thick of things from the beginning and both were heavily damaged in running fights with the British boats.  Here, two MTBs are closed by an R-boat, while an MGB turns away. 

 

 

I'm not sure we really decided a victor for this one, but I'd give it a marginal British victory.  They did more damage to the R-boats than they received, but the coasters - the real target of the attack - received no damage whatsoever.

 

We'll probably play some more coastal games in the near future.  It was quick and fun - it was actually the second game we played that evening.  Not to mention that I want to learn these rules well enough so that I can use them at conventions.  I have a pretty extensive collection of ships and can put together a convoy of fifteen or so freighters and trawlers, plus escorts, so the variety and replayability are pretty high. 





Saxon Seas . . . Errrr . . .

I realized it's been a while since I did anything with any of my blogs and figured it's time to post SOMETHING!  Not last Saturday, but the Saturday before we played a game of Roman Seas.  We really like the rules even though there are a few glitches.  A little logic irons out the problems and it does create a fun game.  We had four large Saxon raiders up against a Roman fleet of two scout ships, three hemoilas and a Liburnian command ship.

The Saxon Fleet

The Roman Fleet

First Contact

The points for both fleets were almost identical, but the Saxons, whose crews man the oars and fight, had significantly more manpower for combat than the Romans, who have separate rowers and marines.  The Saxons would row up to a Roman ship then grapple it, using their greater manpower effectively in hand-to-hand combat.  The Saxons completed hosed the Romans (thus the title of the post), who only escaped at the end of the game with one or two ships with relatively intact crews. 

I think this was the final position, or close to it,

of the ships.

This was the second time we played the game and had a good time both times.  The first time, we used the boardgame that comes on the disc with the rules.  It uses cardboard counters for the ships rather than the miniatures.  We did use a bunch of the ships playing another set of rules, which was ok, but Roman Seas were more fun. 

The ships are mounted on foamcore board that's been spraypainted dark-ish blue.  You can get blue foamcore board but I already had some green board and some blue spraypaint and I didn't want to spend more money for the blue board.  I mounted my first set of ships on artist's mat board, but the bases all warped from the spraypaint and disfigured the ships or pulled free from them.  This seemed to work much better.  It takes me about 15 minutes to cut out a ship, and I cut out several then glue them in turn with Elmer's glue applied sparingly with a toothpick.  It dries pretty quickly that way and doesn't make the color run.  In this way, too, I can assemble four or so ships in an hour and a half to two hours.  I forgot how I had done the inboard details so only one or two ships got that, but now that I'm back up and running, the next batches will all get it.

Next time we play, I'm going to create counters for the marine units so that it's easier to keep track of who's doing what, which was rather tricky.  You can use 6mm figures with the ships, but I don't have any, can't afford them at the moment, and really don't feel like painting them right now anyway!  We'll also do a more traditional Romans vs. Carthaginians battle so both sides have more or less equal ships and crews.  All in all, though, we had a good time.