Somewhere over Southern England, Late Summer, 1940

I shall let the picture do the talking….

Having fought off a late summer head cold I shall be taking to the skies again this evening at the club. Angels 20 is the game, 15mm is the scale and the scenario is a hypothetical skirmish between a patrol of four Hurricanes surprising a similar number of Me110s. In case you are thinking that may be a little one-sided both sides are able to call upon a pair of Spitfires or 109s should things go badly. As ever, we shall be using the cloth and models supplied by Mr Fox whilst yours truly is making up the numbers of 110s (he has three so one of mine is appearing to make up the numbers) as well as overseeing the rules variant we shall be using be using as well as running the scenario. Hopefully I can fly something but the game and test is the thing.

To save a little time on the night I have rolled up the pilot quality using an adapted version of the table found in the old Air Force and Dauntless Expansion Kit. The original table assigned a letter to each nation for every half year they were fighting. These ranged from A to N. The version we are using is a heavily scaled back one in that only a single D6 is rolled rather than 2D6. The Expansion Kit table used the two D6 numerically rather than being added together so for example a roll of 1 followed by a 6 would be read as 16 and not totalled to make 7. This better suited Air Force as the range of pilot quality covered around a dozen or so grades of aircrew rather than poor, average, veteran or ace. Once the identifying letter was determined - in this case, the second half of 1940 - a dice roll was made against the letter column with the result indicating the pilot quality. For the purposes of this scenario the RAF rolled on column H whilst the Luftwaffe used column L. As a rule the higher the letter used the better the aircrew.

The RAF rolled an ace, two veterans, two average and a poor pilot whilst the slightly better Luftwaffe ended up with an ace, three veterans and two average pilots. 

Historically the Hurricane could easily outmanoeuvre the Me110 but the German aircraft was slightly faster. It also had a powerful nose mounted armament - the C variant sported a pair of MG FF 20mm cannon along with no less than four MG 17 machine guns - along with a rear gunner. In game terms anyone getting caught in front of one of these aircraft is going to really question their life choices!

For all that though, the RAF learned how to exploit their manoeuvrability advantage over the Me110 until eventually the much vaunted ‘Zerstorer’ required single engined fighter escort. Later types enjoyed considerable success in the night fighting role and it was also used for ground attack and close air support on the Eastern Front.

As mentioned earlier, this game is another test of the version we have been experimenting with to make the game less gimmicky by not using any of the pilot or aircraft special abilities - these are the curse of the collectible game genre in my opinion! In a nutshell it is all about making a game less gamey and more wargamey.

I will get pictures and post an after action report tomorrow or more likely, Friday.