Beasts of the Air

A multi player game of Wings of War took place as I finally get to use the multi-engine Bombers from Flight of the Giants.

A simple warm up game with just fighters, to get a new player familiarised with the game, was followed by what the rulebook describes as a 'Stop Them' scenario.

From Furness Wargamers in the Air

2 Zeppelin Staakens, the biggest craft in the set with seven crew members, vs 4 allied fighters, 2 British and 1 French and 1 American. The bombers mission was simple, traverse across the board and avoid being shot down by the approaching fighters.

The bombers stayed in formation to give each other covering fire, as the allied initially split fire on the approach to the craft. This soon switched to concentrating on the rearmost plane, but meant inevitably taking a lot of damage from the rear arc gunners.



Colin, who was in charge of both bombers, did jink a bit to keep the fighters in the much more damaging rear arcs, and to stop the attackers from exploiting the rear blind spots. But this forced him towards the edge of the board, and when the picked upon rear craft went down, the other turned and exited the board from the side.

So one giant down, the other chased off, for the loss of two (non-British) fighters, and with heavy damage all round.

This was followed by an actual bombing mission, as an allied seaplane and escort attempted to bomb an inland target against the opposition of 3 central Power fighters. Two of the defenders came in too fast and overshot the seaplane, meaning they had to turn and play catch up as the plane started its run on the target. The 3rd defender got in a good position, but was stuck in the rear arcs of the bomber and in close range of the escort fighter (controlled by myself) and ended up shot to pieces in a single round.



Unfortunately the bomb drop was mistimed and failed to hit the target despite the clear run on target. Bombing from height is quite hard to judge and the bombs fell just long of the target card.
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