Tag: Aerial Combat

05/1/13
mayviation

Welcome to May-viation!

mayviation

Today starts a new month and we here are GrogHeads never like to pass up the opportunity to talk about our two favorite pastimes: military history and gaming. One day Brant was playing solitaire on his Mac, bored out of his mind when the light went off. “May sounds like the start of the A in aviation. We’ll dedicate the month of May to military aviation!”

And so with little more than a poor alliteration and some concatenization we created May-viation.

Despite our lack of planning and vision we have managed to work up enough articles that we think we can manage to publish most of our content in May about military aviation, be it games, history, or both. Exceptions will take place. We can’t force everyone on Kickstarter to only create games that fit our theme, so while the boys at GARPA will be looking for air-based wargames we can’t promise they’ll find them. And variety is the spice of life, so expect a few non-aviation themed articles once in a while.

But rest assured that if you’ve been hankering for some air superiority, we’ll do our best to bring it to you throughout the month. We’re also going to launch a contest. Because March Mayhem was such a success we have decided to do something similar to it for May. We will publish a list of 16 early period World War II single-seat mono-engine fighters, and the first 16 guys to claim them in our forums will get to dogfight until the top aircraft, as voted on by our forumites, has been declared. Yes, there will be some legalese (set anchor to verbiage below) just to ensure anyone with insomnia has some reading material, but the good news is that we’ve got some prizes on the way from a number of companies. Not all of them have arrived yet and we don’t want to offer something we don’t have in-hand yet, but we’re wargamers and it is May-viation, so figure that the prizes should fit the theme.

With that in mind, allow me to introduce the 16 contenders for best early war fighter (single-seat, mono-engine, yada-yada):

Best Single-Seat Mono-engine Early Fighter Aircraft of WWII (nothing past 1941)



Bell P-39 Airacobra


Curtiss P-40 Warhawk
Dewoitine D.520
Focke-Wulf Fw 190
Grumman F4F Wildcat


Hawker Hurricane
Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3


Lavochkin La-5


Macchi C.202
Messerschmitt Bf 109 


Mitsubishi A6M Zero
Nakajima Ki-43 


Reggiane Re.2001
Rogožarski IK-3


Supermarine Spitfire
Yakovlev Yak-1

These aircraft were selected by yours truly. The decision to cut off with this list was based on the rough production year (or at least saw a prototype) of 1941, the fact that I wanted to have 16 planes – no more, no less – and that if we went much later we’d get ourselves into aircraft that ended up later in the war and really have an issue with apples-to-oranges comparisions (yes, I’d love a good discussion of the P-51D versus the Me-262, but we’ll save that for another time). So the choice of selecting these aircraft is mine and mine alone. Arbitrary? I hope not. Yell at me in the forums if you don’t like them, but there it is.

Contest registration will run from May 1 – May 9, 2013

follow the jump for the rules
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11/3/12

GrogHeads Reviews Star Wars X-Wing

Review by Scott Krol, 3 November 2012

Designed and published by Fantasy Flight Games

Is the Force with Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing Miniatures Game or is it a Jar Jar Binks mess of plastic and cardboard?

 

Science fiction may be a genre that is often looked down upon, seen as a realm populated by thirty-year olds living in their parents’ basements, but it has spawned a surprisingly large number of series in both television and film. Many of these series have legions of devoted fans, but none have had a bigger global impact than Star Trek and Star Wars. Arguably, while both are universally known, Star Wars, with its Campbell-esque Hero’s Journey, has had the bigger impact of the two. Yet when it comes to the world of board/table top gaming Star Trek has dominated.

This is somewhat odd for a series that was all about peaceful exploration of the galaxy (just consider the difference in names—Trek versus Wars), and yet there have been numerous wargames of tactical and strategic warfare in the Trek universe. Star Fleet Battles is the best known of these, with literally dozens of expansions and now thousands of pages of rules, yet there are many other flavors of Star Trek wargames available (see Jim Zabek’s recent AAR of Federation Commander).

Fans of Star Wars have had to make do with very few options. Star Warriors from West End Games was a “serious” game of tactical fighter combat, perhaps a little too serious considering the subject matter. Wizards of the Coast released a collectible miniatures game of space combat, but the less said about it, the better. The recent release of Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing, a tactical game of frictionless furballs between fighters in the Star Wars universe, is therefore a welcome addition to any Star Wars fan’s game library.

X-Wing is a miniatures game of fighter versus fighter combat in the Star Wars universe using pre-painted plastic minis scaled at 1/270. Don’t let the fact that these are pre-painted plastic minis scare you off; the quality is impressive. And for anyone who shudders at what the fighters looked like in the Wizards of the Coast game, these models are essentially Ferraris to Wizards’ Yugos. It should also be said that this is not a collectible game in the sense of blind packaging.

xwing

All the currently available fighters, though you can bet we’ll be seeing A-Wings, B-Wings, TIE Interceptors, and more. The bases have interchangable stat cards, showing the fighter’s stats, actions, and firing arc at a glance.

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10/14/12

GrogHeads Reviews Bomber Command

bc

Designer: Lee Brimmicombe-Wood

Publisher: GMT Games

Left Hand Reviews, 14 October, 2012

 

How closely can a boardgame come to simulating the Allies’ strategic night bombing raids of World War II?

 

In an effort to cripple the German war machine and bring the 3rd Reich to its knees, the British Royal Air Force conducted countless night raids in the late stages of the war, 1943-1945. The targets included military manufacturing facilities, populated cities, as well as critical supply routes. Despite the extraordinarily high mortality rate of the bomber squadrons, they continued to fight bravely and eventually succeeded in forcing the German High Command to shift to the defensive.

Bomber Command is a tactical wargame in which one player will control the British bombers, attempting to take out key objectives, while the other play represents the German night fighters and flak batteries desperately trying to infiltrate the Allied bomber squadrons and prevent the destruction of not only brick and mortar targets but the morale of the people as well.

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09/30/12

PC Game Review of FTL: Faster Than Light

Reviewed by Avery Abernethy, 30 September 2012

Publisher: Subset Games

Can a game offering simple mechanics, an absurd plot, and multiple, humiliating fails be any fun? Maybe…

In Space No One Can Hear Your Ship Explode

FTL: Faster Than Light is an very simple, inexpensive and fun PC game. You command a single space ship with a tiny crew. There is an absurdly minimal plot. You belong to a Federation under attack by Rebels. You have information vital to the destruction of the Rebels. To defeat the rebels you must guide your underpowered space ship through a number of star filled sectors defeating other single ships while being slowly chased by a huge enemy fleet. Time is always slipping away.

ftl

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