Winging it

When I heard that Airfix had released a boxed wargame my reaction was along the lines of "That's nice but nothing to do with me". Its not that I never play WWII. Airfix tanks and infantry featured in some of the first games I played with Featherstone's Battle With Model Soldiers back in '71. Since then I have painted and played WWII in 6mm, 10mm, 1/72nd and 54mm with various rules, commercial and home made. These days though, when I play WWII, I play with my friend Ron's toys. For the last few years we've enjoyed some games with modified Memoir but we have both felt a periodic the urge to add a bit more flavour.


Along came Bob with a review of Airfix Battles and some play tests  on Wargaming Miscellany  and I started thinking that Ron might enjoy this and so might I. So I dropped him a note and we did some searching for other comments, reviews and battle reports and found a very useful video on the Modiphius Airfix Battles page .  We decided to see if we could parse out enough of the rules to play a game to see if we liked the vibe.

Getting under way. Note infantry units tacked onto hexes with 2 small dice to mark the current strength. Note also the cheat sheet with copies of unit cards to show stats. We used little markers to show pinned etc on the table. You can also see Ron's home made fudged cards for the test. They were good but real ones with a rule book to explain them will be better! 

Now, the game was by default going to be "our" kind of game, so, Hexon terrain, existing figures and a  Grant scenario. We went with nice simple Sawmill Village and used dice to mark hits on infantry units. Industrious Ron made rule notes from the web, grabbed some basic unit card images and, having made notes on as many cards as possible, fudged a deck of cards.

It goes without saying that the result was not an accurate play test of the rules as published. We didn't know what the proper mix of cards was, were missing details on many of the rules and had to adapt things like 90 degree turns onto a hex grid. Still, it worked.

My attempt to get in a devastating first strike against Ron's Mk IV soon ended with a brewed up Sherman and a nervous Ross. I decided to leave Ron's metal monsters alone for now and unleash my tank on his isolated infantry, hoping to do some crippling damage and cause delay and distraction before rejoining my main force. I don't care what the game is, its a wild gamble to trust your fate to cards or activation dice........

Luckily we are used to winging things using a "feels right/wrong" compass and the resulting game was good. It required us to think and plan to get the best of resources and to use our forces to their best advantage while minding what the enemy was capable of. There were also enough twists of fortune to get the adrenaline pumping and moment of momentary despair or triumph.

 It certainly didn't take long for me to discover that breaking basic tactical principles in favour of a risky gamble was, well, risky! Mind you my "Stuart born again" tank commander almost survived his ride around the enemy. It certainly cost the Germans a leader and enough infantry that by the time they pressed forward to try to take the village from it, it was too late. Saved by the clock!

End of Game. Ron's surviving infantry has pulled itself together and his tanks are shelling my infantry out of the town despite the periodic support of my last, battered Sherman. Another 2 or 3 turns and.... but wait! ... time's up! Darkness  falls, reinforcements arrive or something and the Yanks still hold the crossroads.  

So will I buy? Yes. At this point I don't have spare cash to waste on maps and counters that I'll never use but as soon as the rules and card decks are available individually I do intend to buy. I suspect that Ron will have the boxed intro set as soon as its available over here.

Will I start building my own WWII armies again? Nope. Post war Roscia and Lilliput are close enough for me and I'm quite happy to do my own unit and vehicle stats for those solo games while continuing  to play with Ron's WWII toys.