PSC Battle of Britain, 2nd Playing – 14th Dec 2017

This was our second playing of the new Plastic Soldier Company rendition of Richard Borg’s “Battle of Britain” and a much closer run thing it was too. 43 VP vs 42 VP, in favour of the Luftwaffe. For this game Pete adopted his best Goering impersonation, while Kevin & Phil took on the roles of Dowding and Park.

Pete opened with some well escorted initial raids, starting a process of remorseless erosion of the RAF defenders. However, he was hampered by his initial mission selections, which featured quite a few raids suitable mainly for Luftflotte 5, from Norway!? Pete did however manage to knockout a couple of radar stations and a couple of RAF airfields, giving him a slightly easier run-in for raid 2. But, these were rapidly repaired, which along with a couple of choice interceptions, did manage to thwart a few of Pete’s later raids (otherwise the RAF would not have gained another 8 VPs from aborted (incomplete) missions) and the result rather less knife-edge.

Overall thought to be an enjoyable game, well worth playing again.

A few points noted and adopted for this game;

1. House Rule: Permit the German player (on turn 1) to allocate aircraft cards to Groups / Missions, after seeing them, not blind. This avoids packs of Ju-87s being sent, unescorted to attack Manchester!?
2. Key Rule Missed on Game 1: The “dogfight” and “interception” counters are dual sided and hence the RAF player only has the potential for 5 air combats per turn, interception or dogfight. This does force the RAF player to prioritise the German raids to be intercepted.
3. In game 1, the PSC flight stands were used, but proved rather hard to read for the aging gamers present. Hence for game 2, I had created to rather easier to read set of flight stands. These proved very popular, especially when coupled to my painted metal aircraft minis, which are acting as stand-ins until the new PSC re-mouldings appear. Next are some small croupier sticks!

Elsewhere in the club we had a Chain of Command game, with Dave leading some Americans against Tony’s (“didn’t I tell you these were elite SS Panzergrenediers”) Germans. The result was as one might have expected, with a lot of telegrams being sent out afterward by the Department of Defence!

Further down the hall John was running an ECW game, this time not using TtS, while opposite there was an attractive looking 15m Ancients game (sorry chaps, did not get the rules being used).

Elsewhere, off the premises, carefully behind closed doors, for consenting adults, Chris, Rob and Mal were playing Wild West Exodus. Chris & Rob are known for such perversions, but to lead Malcolm astray is unforgivable! Apparently Version 2 of WWX was much streamlined compared to Version 1 and the most concerning thing about the game was Rob’s rather unnatural dice rolling.