State of Play: not Undaunted: Normandy, but some Aces of Valor

 

 

After a game-free Easter weekend, Monday night was supposed to be Undaunted: Monday. I had set up Scenario 6: Desperate Withdrawal. But, alas, T came down with fluey symptoms and begged off. Making lemonade out of a cancelled game, I packed everything up to ensure it would be a lot easier to set up when we next play (hopefully Monday next week).

In the upside, I have finally got Aces of Valor (Legion Wargames, 2023) to the table. This was an exploratory session; I set it up for a short campaign (eight missions), using the British mid-war planes (Sopwith Camels). I read the rules when I first received the game in the mail, maybe two months ago now, and gave them a quick run-through last night. Setting it up, I realised I hadn’t taken due care in divvying up the counters into appropriate groups when clipping them. The set up took an age, mostly from having to sort through several piles of markers for each tracking token. The planes I’ve started to divide into four separate baggies; Early- Mid-, and Late-era, and support planes (two-seaters and bombers) for each nationality. The British and Germans are done (and labels for the French and US planes), and I’ve divided the target markers into static and mobile, just to make it a tad easier to find the marching infantry or supply depot.  

The first mission, a recon photo op of a supply depot – three fighters and a two-seater – went almost without a hitch; smooth flight out, thanks to the presence of light cloud, located and photographed the depot (two passes, worth six Mission Points), while the fighters found and disposed of a tank (random event) at the site. On the return journey the flight took some AA fire over the enemy trenches, catching one of the rookie pilots for two points of damage, but all made it safely to the home field. I spent one well-earned Mission Point on repairs to the damaged kite, and decided not to convert any of the remaining MPs to Victory Points in case we needed them for more repairs from the next mission.

The second mission was a bombing run – two bombers with a four-fighter escort, as luck would have it (random roll) on the very depot we’d reconnoitred on the first mission. The flight took the same course as the previous mission, but before they had even reached the Entente trench-line, they encountered a flight of Dr-1s lead by Baron Manfred himself (the planes feature first names of the pilots, and the best fighters feature the names of each nation’s highest-tally aces).

This was where the wheels started to come off. The combat system is an abstraction based on each pilot’s Initiative (IN) score, a combination of the plane’s and pilot’s capabilities with a d6 result added to it. Each plane can only fire on the next enemy plane down the IN track. The British pilots rolled generally better than the Germans – Manfred and Billy ended up sharing the 15 box on the track and so couldn’t actually take on each other – but the bombers shared the lowest box and took a hammering from the surviving German fighters. Both bombers had to dump their bomb loads (behind their own lines, but thankfully over a forested area, away from troops or towns) and turn back, so at the end of the second round the Germans and British all broke off in turn and headed back to their respective home airfields to lick their wounds. I didn’t work out the Mission Points hit for the mission failure, but it will probably wipe me out of all my accrued points. In the mean time, I realised there were at least a couple of mistakes I made. The German fighters may not have actually attacked on sighting the British flight, as they were outnumbered 5-6 (if you count the bombers). Also, I never allowed the bombers to fire back at their assailants; Two seaters and bombers have a rear gun (indicated by a reverse arrowhead at the back of the plane) that allows them to defend themselves when fired upon. This should happen simultaneously with each attack, and may have proven enough to convince the Germans to break off before engaging for a second combat round.

I was considering restarting the whole campaign, but as it’s a learning game, I’m inclined to start over from the beginning of the second mission. I had to break the game down (we need somewhere to eat dinner), but a few hastily scribbled notes in all I’ll need to pick up where I left off. Hopefully I’ll manage to get back to the action later in the week. Watch this space.