Scratch One Flat-top!

 Mark was hoping to run Worthington games solo effort 'Scratch One Flat top", a game covering Pacific carrier battles, at this years Virtual Conference of Wargamers (VCOW) back in February. Obviously it is a single player game but we've played loads of these as teams and he wanted to try it out beforehand. The Tuesday/Wednesday regulars all pitched up and we gave it a shot.

The playing area and ship reference cards. This is very similar to the Hunt the Bismarck game with large sea areas subdivided into four, ships have flotation points and the option to burn fuel for extra speed. The main difference with the Bismarck game is that the US player commands two carrier Task Forces, Lexington and Yorktown, each with fighter and bomber groups and an assumed surface escort.

Fairly obviously this the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese are trying to invade Port Moresby with their invasion fleet following the track of white dots from Rabaul down to Moresby and the US have to stop them. Somewhere out there are Japanese carriers, whose actions are run by the game system as it is a solo game.

Normally we'd do this sort of thing on Powerpoint, but Mark had run out of time so for Tuesday we prototyped it with a jpg image of the board and updated it using MS Paint.

The CRT. Carrier groups can allocate fighters to CAP and to bomber escort. Bombers just attack things, there are separate CRTs for both and give an idea of the optimum force levels to allocate. The P results are planes lost, and S results are hits on ships. The ship cards show how many fighters and bombers each carrier has remaining. Like the Bismarck game, combat is very abstracted and the fixed rather than proportional nature of the CRT means you are much better off doing big strikes than little ones.

A downside of using MS Paint as a collaboration tool is that it ends up tiny on the shared screen in Zoom. I projected a copy of the map onto my big second screen to keep track of things. We were all US players, I was allocated the role of Admiral and each TF had a Captain and an air group commander.

We set off westwards with the two TFs in adjacent large squares. each carrier can search one adjacent large square, rather oddly this has to be orthogonal.

You can see the TF tracks on the image above after a few turns. Lexington is blue and Yorktown is gold. The Japanese fleet is tracking along its course marked by red blobs, and the big red blob next to Yorktown is a Japanese carrier group! Shokaku and a light carrier (Shohu?).

A carrier battle duly followed which was quite good fun, but annoyingly Lexington couldn't join in as although it was adjacent, it wasn't orthogonally adjacent. That seemed a bit silly to me. Anyway, we came out top, Shokaku was badly damaged and Shohu went down although poor old Yorktown took quite a hammering. Lexington manouvered to try and catch Shokaku, but it slipped away westwards.

We decided to call it a night at that point to have a washup session. In the AAR it turned out that another Japanese fleet carrier had sailed right past us! We had a good discussion about how to better run the game as a remote team game, and the following evening planned to try it with Discord and parallel presentations using Powerpoint and ConceptBoard to handle the unit display. Sadly I wasn't able to make it but I gather it went well.

tbh although I like the concept of the game, I wont be rushing out to buy it as it just seems too abstract to be a decent simulation of carrier warfare (and this from someone who likes Dominion of...) but it is a good way to pass an evening. I like team based decision games, but I could do with slightly fewer unruly Captains!

Bakudan o otosu!

 Or "Bombs Away!". Tim put on trial game of his VCOW offering, covering Japanese air raids on Wake Island in December 1941. This is of the one player = one bomber crew variety.

We had a good turnout for this one, seven crews. Historically the raids involved 20-30 aircraft at a time. For each plane we had to allocate ourselves and people we knew to the various crew positions, and in a Misubishi G3M, there are quite a few. Two pilots, three gunners plus a bomb aimer and navigator.

The mighty Nell. Tim produced a plastic model of one and waved it around but I failed to take a photo. The raids were conducted over stupendous distances (well over 700 miles), which naturally meant swapping bombs for fuel.

I was designated as flight leader, having once owned a Mitsubishi Lancer (acquired from my father in law).

Wake Island is that tiny blob in the middle of the Pacific, we were flying out missions from the northern Marshall Islands, northwest of Australia.

We flew a series of missions, each one involved taking off, forming up, finding the target, evading the defences, dropping bombs, finding the way home and finally landing unscathed. The success, or otherwise, of each stage was determined by card draws and sometimes a poor result could be avoided by making a 'manouvre test' - which involved throwing a pencil into the air and catching it.

I had a bit of a wobble on takeoff but managed to avoid crashing with a successful manouvre test.

The actual loss rate on the raids was fairly low, in line with the historical averages. The defences downed relatively few aircraft but damaged quite a few.

After three missions I had to duck out, but by that time we'd managed to actually get bombs on target from ten sorties, had three aircraft damaged and one shot down. Casualties were 2 WIA and 8 KIA (almost all from the downed aircraft).

That was lots of fun and there was much whooping and groaning as various good and bad things happened. 

 

14th Army in Burma

John was keen to try out his nice new 14th Army and Japanese figures, so he put on this game set in Burma in early 1945. It was taken from a training scenario on Jungle Warfare, and the idea was to try out the approved drill. The game was run using Blitzspiel using 15mm figures. The ground scale was around 6" to 100 yards, which funnily enough was also the maximum visibility in the dense forest.

The battlefield from the British side. I contributed a few palm trees but they were mainly Johns. It looked pretty jungle-like I think.

The British objective was this village, down at the far end of the track. 

On came the leading platoon, ably led by Graham. The Japanese presence (or not) was indicated by inverted playing cards. The dense undergrowth made the going very slow, but lining up in a big column on the track just seemed to be asking for trouble

After a while some of the suspicious looking cards turned out to be real Japanese troops.

A section of the were lurking in the trees, covering the track.

Their opening shots were ineffective and fairly soon the Brens had them pinned down.

Then it was time for right flanking and clearing the position with bayonet and grenade, covered by the Brens. Just like the manual.

As the Japanese were pinned by fire, they were easily eliminated.

On up the track we went until another lot opened fire. They pinned the leading rifle group.

While all this excitement was going on, the Company command group came on, along with the MFC and other platoon commanders. Runners went back and forth but the Grahams chaps were doing fine.

The lead platoon fanned out,  but the Japanese melted back into the jungle as the rest of the company began marching on.

Things started getting a bit sticky when this nasty MG opened up down the road, pinning the leading section.

Then this sniper started shooting from behind a tree and another Japanese section opened fire.

Time for a spot of smoke to cover the pinned troops on the road.

The leading platoon had another section pinned by the Japanese fire, at which point it was thoroughly bogged own and time to commit the rest of the company against what was obviously a strong position (it turned out there were two other Japanese sections as well).

At that point it was time to call it a day, we'd pushed a fair way up the track but time had run out. The attack never really developed into a company attack as the dense jungle precluded a rapid flanking manouvre. Instead it was a platoon fight and Graham managed to get a long way on his own. It was a shame we didn't manage to do the full company attack but perhaps we were a bit too tentative in our advance.