Bag the Hun - French BC Dunkerque

I made another boat... and by boat I mean battle cruiser and by made I mean I copied it from Wikipedia, cropped and scaled the image using The Gimp and Inkscape.

Anyway I hereby present the French battle cruiser Dunkerque.

1/600 Scale Aircraft Props

I love my little planes, I really do but there was something about them that just didn't feel right.  At first I thought it was because they were so small or maybe even because there wasn't that many miniatures on the table.  But a week or so ago it came to me: no props.  The aircraft look incomplete without them.  So how do I make props that small?

Prototype
I found some scrap laminate I had left over from my card making projects and used a hole punch to make some small discs.  Then using a hobby knife I cut a hole in the middle, this almost ended badly for my hand so please be careful if you are going to try this yourself.

It took a lot of work but I eventually ended up with an aircraft that looks like this:

 

Yeah I know, it looks freaking sweet!  A little grey paint for some prop blur and it will look amazing.  Great so now I just need to make around a hundred or so of these...

Mass Production

My wife has one of those Craft Robo hobby cutters which should do the trick nicely.  The ideas is to use a laminate sheet which should be sturdy without being too thick for the Craft Robo to cut.

It's so obvious now but when putting a laminate pocket through your laminator with nothing in it you have to make sure it comes out the other side.  I wasn't paying enough attention when I noticed half the pocket had gone in one side but nothing was coming out the other!

 Done properly you should get something like this:

 

So I put the laminate onto the carrier sheet and loaded it into the Craft Robo, making sure to put in the right blade and the check all the settings... then I pressed the cut button. 

It looks like it's working...

And it does!

I made two sizes, one based on the the Spitfire prop size and the other based on a He 111.  I rounded the Spitfire one down to the nearest mm while I rounded the Heinkel one up.  It turns out that the bigger ones are too big while the smaller are just right.  I think the bigger ones will be fine for the really big boys like the B-17's and such so I'm not too worried.

 

I'm really happy with the results, they might need a bit of grey paint to show prop blur but even as is they look way better than they did.  I've stuck them on using MDF glue which will dry semi transparent and help with the blurred look.  All up this has taken maybe an hour from cutting the plastic to sticking them on the aircraft and it only cost me one laminate pocket which my rough calculations comes to the princely sum of 16 cents.

Here are the files for anyone who wants to have a go this themselves.  I've included a PDF version so you can cut some out on plain paper to see how the size fares with your models.
PDF version

GSD version


Storage
The only outstanding issue is now of storage.  All of my aircraft are currently stored here:

 

Most of the aircraft have enough clearance with the props on to be stored as-is but a few of them will need little risers.  I think I'll make up some little MDF risers and put some a strip of magnetic sheet on top to hold the aircraft.

Conclusion

If you have aircraft without props and have access to a cutter of some sort then you need to do this.  Your aircraft will look so much better for it.

Update:

Corrected aircraft names in the Mass Production section, thanks Doug.  Not enough sleep and I think one thing and type another.

1/1200 Scale Ships for Bag the Hun

I've been having fun with the expanded rules for ground/surface targets in Bag the Hun I decided to have a go at replacing my plain scraps of paper with some less plain scraps of paper. I haven't bought any minis yet as I'm a little torn between scales. I like the look of 1/1200 scale but they're too big (and expensive) for anything except Bag the Hun, naval games at this scale would require huge tables. 1/2400 minis are just right for the table and the wallet for naval gaming purposes but don't have that 'wow' factor of aircraft buzzing over large ships. So I think I'll start with paper 'top down' shots of some ships for the Hun and see how things go from there.

At 1/1200 they're about 6 hexes long on my map which looks right to my eyes. To reduce them to 1/2400 just print them at 50% magnification. All images are courtesy of Wikipedia.

Download a PDF version here.

Eventually I'd like to get some of these made up for the Battle of the Coral Sea scenarios I've been putting together but for now I'll toy around with these until I'm happy with the size/speed/mechanic etc.

Let me know if you find any of these useful or if you have any particular requests for ships.

Look! Up in the Sky...

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?  No it's Johnny Danger's Bogeys!

Each pack comes with 10 each of red and blue and have "Bag the Hun" etched into the surface.  They're 22mm from side to side (just a little over 3/4") and are made from rigid transparent plastic about 2mm thick.

When I bought these I had planned to use the old white crayon trick to fill in the words on each of the tokens, so I was a little dissapointed when I found the etching on these is too shallow. I would change my on this later though.

So how do they compare in size to a flight stand?  Well I knew you'd ask that so I took some pictures to show you.

Yeah but how do they look on a game mat?  I knew you'd ask that too so here another pic.  It was when I was taking this photo that I noticed  how the text on the token wasn't distracting at all and that it would have been if I was able to fill it in with wax crayon.  My only complain, and it is a minor one, is that it's difficult to determine the facing of the bogey when it's on the mat.  This will be remedied easily enough by painting one of the edges white.

So how do they look in your dice and token case?  Well ok so you wouldn't really ask that question but I did want to show you that they don't require much space to store.  One thing I should mention is that it wasn't until after I had ripped open both packets (I was excited ok) that I realised they came in perfectly sized reusable ziplock bags.

So there you have it, Johnny Danger's Bogeys for Bag the Hun.  I wouldn't say that these are a required purchase purchase for the game but they are pretty spiffy and the extra thickness of them does make it easier to handle them than the 'tiddlywink' type tokens I have been using.  And you can never have too many tokens. 

Or dice...   

Or miniatures...

Never in the Field of Human Conflict...

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few...
Winston Churchill, August 20, 1940.

I'm sure that if Winston were around today he'd be making that exact same speech to the guys at Lard Island.  Yep that day has finally rolled around, Bag the Hun 2 is now on the shelves, in mail boxes and inboxes all over the globe.

Nick and Rich have done a fantastic job (as always) on the rules, the production and just as importantly the customer support.

So if you haven't got Bag the Hun 2 yet (and you should) then, in the words of Ian "Molly" Meldrum "do yourself a favour".  Then get yourself some planes and decals and give me a call, there's always a need for more pilots at the game table.

I'm playing the British though.

Bag the Hun 2 - First Impressions

With release of Bag the Hun 2 from Too Fat Lardies only a few weeks away a lot of gamers are probably wondering about what's changed between editions and is it worth getting?  The Lardie's 2009 Christmas Special gave us a teaser of the new rules in the form of a game report.  This showed us the change from using the Lardie staple, the blind, to using bogeys to represent unspotted aircraft.  Whereas the the blind would represent large groups of aircraft the bogey now represents individual aircraft and dummies.  This looks fantastic on the table, what was previsouly 4-5 large pieces of card is now replaced with 10, 20 or 30 tokens, all depending on the number of aircraft, the pilot skills and the territory you're fighting over.

As the title of the post suggests this is merley going to be some ramblings about my impressions of the rules after a few readthroughs.  I'd like to follow this up with a few more posts that go into a lot more depth, get some feedback from other gamers and where possible show some "on the table" shots.

The Book Itself

So first up the book itself.  And by book I mean PDF, I prefer printing the book myself for a few reasons:

1. I can put the book into those presentation folders with the plastic sleeves.  This makes a book a lot more resilient to 'chip fingers' and the rough handling it gets on game night.
2. I usually print two copies, one full book for me and another with just the "how to play" sections for the other side of the table.  This copy usually gets the highlighter treatment to mark specific rules and so on.  This makes it so much easier to introduce new players to the game.
3. An extension of point 1 really but I like to keep the rules, any updates and scenarios I come across all together in the one folder.  It's so much easier to grab one folder when packing my game bag.

Ok with that aside let's get back to the new rulebook.  It's big.  BTH1 came in at something like 30 pages including the covers, BTH2 is a whopping 82 pages including the covers.  The quality of the layout and artwork is superb, book after book the Lardies have been nailing that fine line between eye candy versus printer ink.  More importantly is that the layout helps the readability of the book.  And this is important as there is a lot in the book.

Tables, Tables Everywhere and Not A...

Ok bad Coleridge reference there but one thing you notic with the new layout is that there are tables every where.  Don't worry though, this is not a bad thing at all.  The new look tables have guiding arrows that make it a lot easier to read tables that would normally be hard to decipher.  This makes looking things up a lot quicker during game play.  Excellent work Lardies.

Almost every area of the game has been expanded, whereas the first BTH was targetted at the Battle of Britain the new edition has been expanded to cover all theaters of WW2 and would also work quite easily with earlier periods such as the Spanish Civil War.    To accomplish this the core of the game has been fleshed out accordingly:

• New formations
• New manoeuvers
• Greatly expanded aircraft data (8 pages of them).
• Expanded damage tables (dealing with single and multi-engine aircraft)
• More detailed pilot generation
• Expanded flak rules
• Expanded bombing rules

So What's New?
There's new rules cover all those house rules we've keep bolting onto the system:

• Air to air rockets
• Ground and naval targets
• Strafing
• Torpedo attacks
• Doodlebugs

Also presented are some optional rules for:

• Pilot characteristics
• More granular altitude bands (0-12)
• Clouds
• Take off and Landing
• Jets! (oh yeah)

What's also great to see is a nine page "Intelligence Briefing" about the formations used by the aircraft of both sides.  This really helps the keen WW2 gamers who aren't historians (ie me) to "play the period, not the rules".

My Favourite Bit So Far?

Ammunition, or more precisley they way it's now handled.  Previously you knew how much ammo you had and you could decide how much to use.  There were restrictions of course on how much you could use but now... oh man this is cool, you get a deciding factor in how many dice you roll to attack (usually around 10-15 dice) and you burn 1 second of ammo for every die that comes up a 1.  Other factors like the pilot skill, the number of successful hits vs saves and so on also affect the final value.  Additionally any attack that runs out of ammo is counted an automatic miss, regardless of the number of hits.  I love this rule, it just brings out the tension that a pilot must have felt when they knew they were low, but just how low?

Thoughts
I think BTH2 is a worthy successor to a game that was already fantastic.  The expanded rules still feel like the 'old rules' so there's nothing shocking and new rules just fill out the game nicley.  It has enough detail now that you can play small games of 2-3 aircraft aside yet it handles big games of 30-40 aircraft with ease.

I simply cannot wait to get this onto the table at the club, I've already converted a few guys there to the Lardie school of gaming but this is really going to get people buying miniatures.

I think this is the better of the two versions to start with if you haven't played BTH before, and if you have played BTH before then chances are you're going to buy this version anyway.  But trust me you'll like what you read.

More to Come

I'll try to get some aircraft on the table over the next week or two and put up some posts with a little more detail on specific aspects of the game.

So now that BTH2 is done, roll on Algy 2!
(Just kidding Nick and Rich, you can finish CDS first, I'll need a few months to paint all the new aircraft [and ships] you've made me go and buy... see Vicki it's all their fault)

Bag the Hun - Bonus Cards

Part of the Operation Bodenplatte scenarios I've been putting together includes a system where pilots can earn one-shot abilities to help mix things up on the table.  Some sceanarios call for selection from a specific set of cards while others allow the player to choose from any available.  Cards are selected secretly and are placed face down until played.

Until recetnly these cards have simply been scraps of paper with vague notes like "+/- 2 SPD then discard" so I thought that since I was already making some cards for BTH 2 I might put together a few using the new look.

Again the artwork has been borrowed from here, there and everywhere.  Also I not too happy with the images for "Whites" or "Finesse" but free time is short and so they'll do for now.

Download a PDF version here.

I don't want the cards to be too powerful but I'd like them to be able to add a little oomph when you really need it.  So I put it to everyone out there, what do you think?

Bag the Hun - More Decals

With the imminent release of Bag the Hun 2 I thought I should get some paint on the last couple bags of my Tumbling Dice aircraft, mainly the US and Japanese aircraft.  I had them all out on the painting table when I realised I didn't have any decals to finish them off.  That just wouldn't do, so I quickly jumped onto Dom's website and had a look for what decals I'd need.

Hmmm just what I thought, the US changed their roundels around a fair bit mid to late war and since I didn't want to paint up the same models for each period I settled on the "600-US-2" set (see below).  They're only used between '42-'43 but I think they'll look better on the small TD aircraft than the other designs would.

For the Japanese aircraft I went with the "600-JA-1" set, nothing to fancy but saves me having to paint a heap of red circles.   The white border should help the decal stand out too.

Lastly I thought I'd grab a set of Germain tail markings, set "300-GE-10a" to help finish off the bigger bombers.  These are actually 1/300 scale decals but should fit the bombers just fine, with a little luck the smaller may even go onto the fighters.

I was very tempted to pick up some more aircraft, specifically the late war German jet fighters, but I'll wait until I've had a good read through of the BTH2 rulebook before I make any purchases.  Besides the Bosche have little trouble knocking my Spits out of the sky as it is, do I really need to make it any easier for them?  I guess I could get some Meteors to even things up a little.  I have a birthday coming up soon, I think a celebratory purchase will be in order.

Bag the Hun - Cards and Fighter Sheets

There's been some interest latley in the bits and pieces I've put together for Too Fat Lardies Bag The Hun so I thought rather than emailing this stuff around I'd upload them somewhere and paste the links here.

Fighter Sheets
There's plenty of these around the traps but I wanted one that would let me track a whole squadron on a single sheet.  Works a treat for those really big games.  When I get time, haha I made a funny, I'd like to make different versions of these for the Germans and maybe even make up some already filled out (we tend to play a lot of Spitfire vs 'Schmitt games).  I have a few bomber and fighter bomber ones of these too but they're nowhere near complete.

Download Fighter Sheets (PDF, 222kb)

Cards for BTH 1

My first attempt at making cards for any of the Too Fat Lardies games actually.  I'm pretty happy with the results but to be honest all I really did was redesigned some cards I found on the net somewhere (Dogs of War gaming group comes to mind but I'm not 100% sure).

Download BTH 1 Cards (PDF, 1.8Mb)

Cards for BTH 2

These are still very much a work in progress given that the game isn't quite out yet.  They look a lot purtier, IMHO, than the 1st edition ones but they've taken maybe 5 times longer to make.

NOTE: This is not a complete set.  All the core cards are there and the British and German airforces are covered but most of the other belligerants only have their character cards, and even then most of them are just copy/pastes of the British cards.

Download BTH 2 Cards (PDF, 2.5Mb)

So there you have it, if you download these and like them please do me a favour and leave a comment as it will motivated me to keep putting this stuff up.  Or if you don't like it then let me know why too.

Timbo

Bag the Hun Hex Mat Under the Microscope

A little while ago now I put together a nice hex mat for use with Bag the Hun, you can see the end result here, here and here.  There were a few bumps along the way which you can look at and grimace here and here.

So with all the lessons learned and as much information gathered as I could, how did I actually make it?

Step 1: Aerial photography
At work I have access to our GIS system which has aerial photography of our city and the local surrounds.  I spent quite a while trying to find an area that when zoomed out looked something like Europe during WW2.  Basically rolling hills, farms and small clusters of towns, nothing too modern.  I got the system to export the map as a whopping huge JPG.  At 200dpi the file is around 30mb and is 8,401x11,893 pixels in size.  Which when printed should come out to at least 106.7cm x 151cm (42"x59.5"), I'll explain more about that in step 3.

Step 2:  Hexes
I needed lots and lots of them, so how to put them in the image at the right size.  I had decided on 1.5" hexes as I wanted as many hexes as I could get on the mat.  I like playing big battles, 3 to 4 squadrons at a time big.  Bombers fit nicely on the 1.5" hexes although I haven't got any of the big boys, you know the FW200, B17's and so on.

Initially I used The Gimp to put the hexes in with a plugin in aptly named "Hex Grid".  There's probably other plugins that do it as well but this one was pretty easy.  I tested it on an A4 image first and went through a few iterations of filter/print/measure/repeat.

In the end though we used AutoCAD to render the hexes and then imported them and the aerial photo into our mapping software.  At that point we added a spiffy border and decided on a page size.

Step 3: Paper Size
We initially were going to print the mat on B0 sized paper but decided to go with "ISO B0 Oversized" or something or rather.  Bigger the better I thought, this ended up bighting me in the arse later though.  Before getting to far into steps 1 and 2, and assuming for the moment that money is no object here, I should have asked two vitally important questions:

1. How big can I print this?
2. And oh so more impartantly "at that size can I get it laminated?"

Step 4: Laminating
None of the copier places around town could laminate anything over 1m wide and/or 1.4m long. I was sunk in both areas.  After a day of calling around I eventually found a print house that could do what they call cold press laminating.  Laminating usually is the process of putting your work into a plastic pocket/sock and heating it up so that it seals both sides.  Cold press laminating uses rollers and great pressure to press plastic onto one side of your mat.  The plastic they used on mine was a matt plastic and didn't have the high gloss shine you usually get with laminating.  This looks fan-freaking-tastic on the table.

Step 5: Using It
The guy that did the laminating for me told me that I could roll this thing up and that it would roll out flat again even after being in storage for a while.  This is not the case.  However I do find that all it takes is a bit of BluTac and some stick tape and the mat stays nice and flat on the table.

Costs
Ahh the biggest question of all, how much did it cost me?  The printing cost me very little, but after asking around at work it would usually cost around the $20-$30AUS to print.  The cost will vary though depending on the resolution and quality it's printed at.  I went for 200dpi and normal quality, it doesn't need to be high-res or have lots of detail as that would just detract from your miniatures.  The laminating cost me $25AUS.

So would I do it again?  I don't know.  I do need some naval mats for the Pacific theater but I'm thinking I'll just go with a couple double sided Hotz Mats.  The felt makes them so much easier to store and just roll out on the table.  I love my western town mat I got from them and their prices aren't that much more than what it would cost me to make my own.

So that's how I made my BTH mat.  I'm sure I've missed something out or maybe just glossed over something to quickly, if so just leave a comment here and I'll do my best to clarify/expand.

Also if anyone wants a copy of the artwork or the completed mat files just drop an email to tcoombes @ bigpond dot net dot au.

Thanks for reading,

Timbo

Cards for Hardy, Algy and the Hun

I picked up couple rulesets from Too Fat Lardies recently and since they're all card driven I needed some new cards.

First up is the Napolenoic era naval rules Kiss Me Hardy. I'm really happy with how these are turning out and I should have them done in time to have a few games this weekend. I'm planning on using the WizKids Pirates of the Spanish Main ships. They're about the right size and are cheap, which is very handy when you're trying to refight the battle of Trafalgar.



I started working on the cards for their WW1 aerial combat rules Algernon Pulls it Off (stop that snickering - this is serious... heh heh he said pulls it off) but I got side tracked when my playtest copy of Bag the Hun 2 turned up in my inbox. It turns out that I needed a few new cards for BTH2 and I decided to use my newfound uber Publisher skills and create some purtyer cards.

Obviously I can't say too much about BTH2 suffice to say any house rules I was thinking about using are no longer needed, BTH2 is very comprehensive and looks to be a magnificent successor to an already great game.

Bag the Hun - AAR

Another great game of Bag The Hun last night. Reichsmarschall Toby and I played another 'Get the bomber home' scenario and both of us were fielding some freshly painted (but not quite finished) models.

Luftwaffe
1 Heinkel He 111
4 Messerschmitt Bf 110
4 Messerschmitt Bf 109

RAF
6 Supermarine Spitfire MK1 (in two sections)
3 Hawker Hurricane MIIc

The game started with the hun heading north to south (left to right in the photo below) with RAF starting in the south west and heading for intercept.

A nice table level shot shows a section of the Spitfires and the Hurricanes heading straight for the bombers and fighter bombers while green section hangs back to see where the 109s were heading.

The 110's may be bigger and less maneouvarable than your average 109 but they pack just as much of a punch.

A shot from the Hun end of the table. Things look a lot cleaner on the table with the altitude dice attached to the bases.

Turn two started off with the fighters exchanging fire. The Hurricanes popper up in front of the 109's received some fire with no effect and quickly returned fire resulting in one of the 109's exploding into a huge ball of flame. The Hurricanes quickly passed the 109's and started to swarm the Heinkel. Junior Ace Harold Potta opened fire on the Heinkel and managed to damage the fuel lines (+3 on subsequent damage rolls, remember this it becomes important later). All I'm hoping for now is the 'Red Section Fire' card...

The Spitfires valiantly try to hold off the Messerschmitts. Fire is exchanged and losses are taken on both sides. A Spitfire explodes and another is damaged, a 110 also gets hit hard. A great opportunity to bring out the pipe cleaner smoke trails.

Well... what I had hoped wouldn't happen... did. The 'Bomber Move' card.

But with the end of the deck means a new turn. And with a new turn comes a reshuffled deck and so with a little bit of luck and a strong tailwind...

Success!! A hard turn, altitude drop and the choice of throttle dice put Section Leader Potta right behind the heinkell. Things start to look up as Potta passes his Getting on the Tail test. Things start to look a little gloomy as a 109 (just to the left of this photo) moves up behind Potta and attempts also to get on the tail, thankfully he fails. Hun aircraft start to move in from everywhere in an attampt to remove the Hurricane from it's lofty perch of destruction.

Well Potta had worked his magic and soon enough a card he's been waiting on turns over 'Character 1'. Potta opens fire with both cannons and uses every last round left. Base attack of 10, Junior Ace is +1 (11), 8 sections of fire is +5 (16), Target is Size 5 so +4 (20) and he's Dead Close so +2 again for a total of 22 dice. The result is good 6 successes. The Heinkell save 1 to reduce the hits to 5 which is still enough for a Critical roll. The roll is a 7 'Critical Instrument Damage' which is not exactly the result I wanted... but then Toby reminds me that no it's actually a 10, the Fuel Leak from the previous turn adds +3 to the next damage result. 10... so in the immortal words of Marvin the Martian: kaboom an Earth shattering kaboom.

A great game and a solid victory to the British. I simply cannot wait to get my hands on Bag the Hun 2 and the rules for ground attacks. I'm really looking forward to some big bombing run games... and will give me chance to use the dozen or so Do17 miniatures. Oh and of course I'd had to get some Mark Vc Spitfires in the air, fire factor 12 anyone?

Bag the Hun - Better Bases

My order of tokens and dice from Em4 arrived not so long ago and with Badga on tonight I thought I should actually get everything ready.

The 7mm dice are just the right size to blue-tac onto the base. This solves the problem of dice getting left behind after a plane has moved and the confusion of conjestion "is this dice for your plane or my plane?". Also there's no chance of altitude dice getting confused with fire dice (especially around planes at altitude 5-6).

Here's everything stored in a small case, I'd like to try and find a bigger one though as I'd like to store all the dice and tokens for all my games in the one place.

Anyway gotta grab a coffee and get back to painting the 110's for tonight.

Em4 Tokens and Dice

I found my order from Em4 waiting for me in the mailbox tonight. These should be rather useful for Bag the Hun and the reaction based games from Two Hour Wargames (Nuts!, Six Gun Sound and so on).

The 7mm blue dice will be rather used as altitude markers in Bag the Hun.


The coloured tokens are also the right size to be used as a reputation marker in the Two Hour Wargames systems. This should make games of Nuts pretty much record sheet free.

Also some of the coloured discs will be used for Bag the Hun as squadron markers.

I just need to find a case/caddy big enough to sort these out, another trip to the thrift/hardware store methinks.

Bag the Hun

I didn't manage to get the western stuff ready in time for Badga so I took along the trust Bag the Hun and set that up. Mick played the Germans who had to escort a Dornier off the table. Once again I strapped myself into the cockpit of a Spitfire and tried to bring the big guy down.

I forgot I had the camera with me so the first shot is sometime in the third turn. The three Spitfires had the Dornier surrounded and hit it with everything they had. Gunner killed and temporary loss of control followed by another hit that stopped the bomber from climbing and performing hard maneuvers. The next two cards though were the Bomber Move and the bomber Pilot character card. The darned thing made it's roll to regain control and quickly (for a Dornier) ducked out of there. Soooo close.


Another shot of the Dornier trying to make a quick getaway. The pilot character card really helped the Germans in this scenario. What should have been a 6-7 run across the table ended up being 5 turns, not a lot of time to take it down.

One lone Junior Ace desperay left trying to catch the bomber when three BF109's swooped in to make things even harder.

Result: A win for Mick and the Hun. The British managed to cause some serious damage to the bomber and rattle a few of the BF109's but at the cost of two downed Spitfires was too high a price for so little a return.

The coloured tokens in the bases really helped move things along. The smaller dice for altitude should also tidy up the table, possibly even being able to blu-tac them to the base also.

I think next meet we'll try a game with 3-4 players and give every one a section or two each. Hmmm I'd better paint the rest of the 109's and the Hurricane's then.

Tiddlywhatsits and Teeny Tiny Dice

I just ordered around 240 odd of these things from EM4 Miniatures . The idea is to use them under the clear base of my flight stands for Bag the Hun and they, at 22mm, should fit nicely under the base of my 28mm minis for Nuts! and Six Gun Sound. The concept is to use colours to mark flights/schwarms in Bag the Hun and for Nuts!/Six Gun Sound the colours will represent the reputation value of the miniature (eg none for rep 3, White for 4, Red for 5 and Yellow for 6).

I also ordered 40 7mm six sided dice to use as altitude markers in Bag the Hun. Should stop them getting mixed up with the hand fulls of combat dice getting thrown around. At that size they could possibly stuck on the base with be blutac.

It's all great in theory... more info and photos after they arrive, which fingers crossed, if before

A New Hex Mat

Managed to finally get my new hex mat for Bag the Hun laminated today. It took a bit to find someone who could laminate oversized B0. The laminate is matt finished and looks fantastic on the table. The finish eliminates the shiny reflective surface of most other laminates and also mutes the map image somewhat which helps the miniatures stay the focus of the game.

So to celebrate the new mat Toby and I decided to drag out the miniatures and have a game. Three squadrons of Spitfires vs two schwarms of 'Schmitts escorting two DO-17's. The British needed to down one of the bombers to get a minor victory and both for a outright victory.

The planes starting to group up forced a lot of altitude changes and desperate manoeuvering in order to shake planes of their tail. A lot of the sprogs did rather well this game with only a few failing their manoeuvre rolls.

You can see in the shot below that even up close the mat doesn't get lost in the flash.

The bombers absorbed a lot of gunfire with a lot of minor damage results, eventually though after one of the Dornier's lost a gunner and an injured pilot they decided to bail out. With time running out and the edge of the map getting closer every turn it proved impossible to take out the second bomber when it dived below the fighters altitude. The most intense dogfighting took place in the 5-6 band range with the bombers hovering around 3-4 and eventually snuck down to 2.

In the end the British scored a minor victory taking down one of the bombers. The Germans achieved a tactical victory by accounting for three of the spitfires with another 3-4 in imminent trouble.

I really need to get some different coloured dice to minimise the chance of getting mixed up with the attack dice. All up the game was over in under an hour which is pretty good considering we were pushing around 22 planes. Next time I'd like to try a 3 player game with 30-40 planes and have some bombing runs to give the big guys something to do other than head for the other edge of the mat.

Bag the Hun - Operation Bodenplatte Scenario 1

Just a quick post for my first Bag the Hun scenario of Operation Bodenplatte. Now with updated maps and correct aircraft listings (note to self: do not write scenarios while under the influence of head cold medication).

I've left out pilot names as I haven't decided if I'll go down that path or not yet.
I've played this scenario a few times solo and it doesn't appear broken, I'll give it a good run through down at the club this weekend. Any comments or suggestions welcome, also if you want a pdf version email me at tcoombes at bigpond dot net dot au and I'll get a copy to you.