Check Your Six AAR or three games in one night!

Some followers may remember me buying the rules for Check Your Six for £1 about six or so months ago from Maelstrom when they were selling off lots of things before the creditors could get their share. Since then I have fancied having a go and that finally happened Friday night. So what did I think? Well it's an expensive £1 for sure. No the rules are not THAT bad  :-), it's the cost of the Russian planes I will be getting probably at the Worlds at the end of the year. Then the next air force and the next.... You know what I mean. 

So yes I thought the rules played well and whilst simple still have depth through play and give you a good game. Whilst the games were learn the rules driven we both wanted a good game so whilst not super competitive we were both in it to win it. Laughing though should be compulsive in wargameing and we certainly had a fair few chuckles at each others expense.

I took the French and Matt had the Germans, ME110's in this case. He even let me have a nice tail like position (not a tail as I was too far away). I thought this was rather sporting, well until he pulled an Immelmann and was facing me! This was the start of learning the rules through experience.

After failing to get into a good position I managed to get into a really bad one whilst Matt did a great example of formation flying.

I was between a rock and a hard place and all I could hope for was bad dice and even the possibility that Matt would shoot down his lead plane in all the excitement. This err did not happen and my first plane finally was shot down.

Well if you thought it could not get any worse, think again. Though my plane survived the pass it was damaged which meant he was dead man flying.

The final act, my plane was by this point a flying brick and even ME110's could fly rings around me.

I learnt several things from the first game, poor firepower against sturdy planes mean you need to get good hits to even hope to bring down the enemy whilst a weak airframe needs to keep out of the way of the front guns of high firepower planes. Though the ME110 has low velocity cannons so it's not so hard to keep that distance, well it's not if you know what you are doing. So armed with the same planes and a better idea of what I was doing.

Game two had random start positions which had my planes separated more than the flying circus so I spent the first couple of turns trying to get them closer so they can support each other whilst at the same time not leaving myself too open to massed attack. Oh I should mention that in the two first games I rolled low enough to get an Ace which is a big advantage. 

Big enough that I was able to change my orders enough to get a fly past on one of the German's scoring a fairly lucky engine hit as I went past whilst using my pilots skill to keep German lead out of my plane. The ME110 is not known for it's dynamic flying ability and when damaged a straight line seems a bit adventurous.

My other plane was quite a bit behind the action but as it turned out, in perfect position to take advantage of Matt's situation.

I was able to shoot down the undamaged ME110 in one long rattle of guns leaving Matt with the crippled survivor. So we called it at that so we could get a third game in.

This time we changed up the planes a bit and Matt got the ace this time, yep the guy with the white cowling. The ace though was a bit of a no hoper missing shot after shot as I tried to keep myself in the air. But finally killing off my best plane.

That left me with err one lesser plane and two rather hungry looking 109's, at least they were early models which meant I had some chance.

I did manage to clip the wings of the none ace but as we traded airframe damage that was a win for Matt. In the end my poor plane was shot down and it was all over but the laughing.

So a mighty fine time we had and we will be going at it again in a few weeks but next time with more planes per side. I am really looking forward to getting into it again and hope to take the lessons from the games played and run with it.