Check Your Six!

All right, last Friday night Andy and I got in on a Check Your Six! game run by a mutual friend, Brian, and a group of peeps we regularly game with. Brian, in turn, was running this particular scenario as a warm-up for when he runs it at Historicon later this month, so we were happy to be his guinea pigs. Check Your Six! (CY6!) is a World War II air combat game, and it was a freakin' blast. The rules were chunky, but played in a very easy-going and intuitive manner. It could've been completely quagmired in charts, diagrams, and confusion with very little effort, but it wasn't. I felt comfortable enough by the second round that I was able to plot my moves and get a feel for what to do without a bunch of hand-holding. In a convention setting, it's pretty much perfect. I could see myself playing a lot more of it in the future, it was that good.

Now the above pics pretty much say it all. It was a great game, on a huge table, with some neat little planes that were painted very well (click on the above pics). There were five of us altogether. In all honesty, I'm not traditionally a historic gamer, not that I'm adverse to them, I just haven't found a period that I can sink my teeth into (well, maybe FIW) and I do love my sci-fi. I know the major players of WWII, mostly I know the equipment used, but the particulars, the nitty gritty I'm a bit slack on, fortunately that wasn't a factor for this game or group of players.

The basic scenario was that General MacArthur and some other allied big-wigs were touring the countryside with their awesome P-38 escorts, and then were ambushed by Japanese forces. I controlled a couple of P-38 Lightnings (one was an 'ace' pilot) as well as all three of the bombers. Two of the bombers turned tail and got out of the fray as fast as they could (which wasn't saying much), but I ran one bomber as a 'wildcat' that tore through the enemy fighters as best as it could, it's exterior bristling with machine guns and cannons. The bombers claimed a kill, and my Lightnings took out four more.

There is a lot more to it than this, obviously, but how do you do a game report when there's already one done on the exact same game? I already borrowed his pics, so I'll just refer you to Brian's gaming blog for the full details, you should definitely check 'em out. His blog, Repple Depple, is listed over on the right along with Andy's as well as some other noteworthy ones.