Check Your Six! game 20260201

 Last Sunday we played an old favourite of ours, Check Your Six! WWII aerial warfare. We played the first scenario of the Guadalcanal campaign book, putting 4 Wildcats of VMF-223 on their first patrol up against 6 Zeroes fresh out of Rabaul. Eddy and Ruben played the Japanese, JP and myself the Americans. Pilot wise the Japanese were all Skilled (these were army pilots, not the veteran Kido Butai naval pilots), while the Americans had a mix of two green pilots (played by JP), a skilled and a veteran pilot (the last representing the CO of VMF-223).

The table a few rounds into the game. The Japanese are closing in on the Americans in two groups.

I deliberately started the game with the planes a bit further apart then stipulated in the written scenario to prolong the approach phase a bit. This gave the players some time to get familiar with the maneuvring rules - it has probably been more than a decade since Eddy and myself played these rules and for JP and Ruben it was their first time to do so. During the approach phase, the Japanese advanced in two groups with Ruben taking his planes in a wide right hand sweep of the table. The American pilots, separated in two groups with about a single move distance between them, angled to intercept the other Japanese group piloted by Eddy.

Eddy and Ruben plotting their moves

Approaching the enemy is all good and well, but the real deal is of course the dogfighting once contact is made. JP's green pilots made a first sweep through Eddy's flight, but despite furious attempts from both sides, the high speed head on approach resulted in a lot of noise but no hits. At that point, my two pilots turned into the melee and positioned themselves to tail the Japanese. Unfortunately, that was when disaster struck -- my skilled pilot executed a text book Immelman to sneak up onto the tail of a Zero but miscalculated his maneuver and collided with said Zero (we ended up in the same hex at the same height, and both pilots failed their aircrew check). The result was two severely damaged planes (the Zero caught fire and would be shot down the next turn, the Wildcat pilot would need to crawl home and eject over the airfield as the plane's elevators were reduced to a few flapping shreds of aluminium), but an even worse outcome was produced when debris from the collision hit the veteran pilot's plane causing airframe damage before he had even fired a single shot.

The second flight of Zeros banking left into the fight

At that point, Ruben's flight joined the fight - three fresh Zeroes joined the two Eddy had left (the burning Zero involved in the collision was shot down by the veteran American pilot) and quickly set things to right. With the two green American pilots out of the fight (one had received engine damage and was severely slowed down, the other turned away out of the fight) and Eddy's remaining Zeros turning to catch up, it was up to Ruben's force to finish the job. The American veteran turned in to the pack of Zeros, counting on the fact that a head-on or deflection shot by the Japanese planes would probably miss. Unfortunately, Ruben's lead Zero pilot took careful aim, proceeded to hit the American plane with a full blast of cannon and machine guns and brought it down crashing in flames - scratch one American squadron CO.

At this point we called the game as a Japanese victory; The Americans lost one plane (flown by the squadron CO no less) and had two heavily damaged, while the Japanese only lost one plane. Well done to the Japanese players!

This game showed that we still like the CY6! system a lot - by turn 3 all players were no longer thinking of the rules but looking at the table and figuring out what tactical moves to plot to gain an advantage - as it should be. As an aside, the firing could be a bit more elegant (I know Phil will have his say about the roll-to-hit with modifiers, roll-for-amount-of-damage, roll-for-robustness with column shifts, roll-for-actual-damage sequence🙂 ) but as you're usually not playing with many planes on the table, it all goes quite smoothly in reality.

Will definitely be repeated!

Lego flight stands (from the archives!)

Another one from the digital archives: flight stands using round Lego bricks.

Quite some years ago (around 2009? 2010?) we played a series of games with the Check Your Six rules. Tracking altitude in air wargames is always a bit of hassle. Most of us prefer something visual (changing the height of the model), but that's not always easy to achieve. The result is too often an ugly contraption obscuring the model itself.

Frank came up with this idea. If I remember correctly, he custom-ordered round transparent Lego bricks, mounted a magnet on the top one such that the model could bank, and presto! Inserting additional bricks for altitude changes is trivial. Let the pictures speak for themselves ...

First Check Your Six game

We recently tried our first game of [Check Your Six](http://mysite.verizon.net/fisherts/skirmishcampaigns/cy6/), a WWII aerial hex based ruleset, using Franks excellently painted Tumbling Dice 1:600th scale Battle of Britain planes (get them at [Dom's Decals](http://www.domsdecals.com) ).

As this was our first game using these rules, we played a very simple one on one (actually two on two) fight, featuring two Spitfires versus two Messerschmitts, all flown by Skilled pilots (basically trained well but with little combat experience). The result was surprisingly, though probably historically correct, bloodless.

Here's a few of the players' comments. First Frank:

So we had our first CY6-game on Monday, with Koen, Eddy, Bart en me.

All being new pilots we just had a little skirmish between 2 Spitfires Mk.1a en 2 Messerschmitt Be109's, learning how to manoeuvre and shoot at the enemy. Fortunatly for me Bart had to play with Eddy flying the Spitfires, Koen und I veire fleyink ze Messerschmitt's.

The game felt very realistic, climbing and making sharp turns or extreme turns surely had it's concequences on the speed which could make you a sitting duck or denied you a chance on firing on a plane which flew higher.
Anyway for optimal fire you have to get close, preferably from behind. The Spits had the advantage on range because their light machine guns where overall better on medium range where the Messerschmitt's low velocity canon's made it hard to hit the British.

My plane got the first hit giving it engine damage, reducing my max speed to half it's original speed, climbing was very risky, there was a change of 2/3 that I got out of controle. My 3 attempts to climb for the remainder of the game all failed :-). But on the bright side Eddy the Noob emptied his complete stock of ammo on me :-). From there on Eddy's purpose in game was to try ramming Koen or me, but that seemed harder than Eddy had in mind.

Due to a difficult and failed manoeuvre Eddy dropped out of the Tacticale Airband which forced him to make a Pilot Skill Check which he failed, Eddy flew his spit in to the ground to never be heard of again...

I fled the English sky, due to the fact that I wasn't able to climb to engage Bart. Anyway my speed limitation made it impossible to engage Bart who was always flying higher than me. After that Koen left the battlefield as well an got home safely :)

So score was 4 - 1 (4pts for a destroyed spit - 1pt for a damaged Messerschmitt), a well deserved victory for ze germans, although Eddy will not agree (see his mail which will folow soon)

Conclusion: it was a nice learning game with limited damage at the end. From the moment on that we'll deploy more aircraft casualties and carnage will rise :-) but the rules are pretty good making this a very tactical game.

Then Eddy:

Quite frankly this was the most undeserved victory in living memory. Not a single German bullet ever touched my British plane while I raked Frank's Messy Schmidt with bulletholes from prop to rudder.

Only pure chance, spit, and Got Mit Uns kept his plane above ground level as he was outmaneuvred, dare I say it : outclassed at every turn.

Apart from that : pretty realistic rules really and once you get the hang of it, it can go pretty fast. We definitely need a couple more planes in the air to make it a bit more chaotic and to make sure the kill ratio goes up.

And finally myself:

(...) my view is pretty similar to Eddy's - totally undeserved victory and realistic rules :). The rules take a bit of getting used to, but I quickly found myself thinking of the tactical situation ("I have to get above Koen's plane and try and turn inside his turning arc") before the mechanisms of the game ("I can do an L43 turn with a climb"), so that's good. The lack of deadliness is also pretty much right on I think. Sure, I did most of my firing at long range (6 hexes or so), but I also fired two point blank bursts at Koen's plane without any effect - unsatisfying but more or less realistic I think, when you think about the reports from the actual fights (typical engagement: "10 Spits attacked 42 bombers escorted by 18 fighters - 4 bombers and 2 fighters were downed for the loss of two Spitfires. The remaining Germans aborted their mission and went home.")

Definitely up for repetition, I'd say.