Saturday 29 August 2009

Playtesting draft


OK. With holiday silly season behind us, the cricket season winding down and the procession of family events that all combine to make the summer so busy finally winding down my attention has again been allowed to shift back to getting BTH2 out for playtesting. The main body of text and rules is complete, and I am now just tidying up formations and reformatting the aircraft stats into something that makes best use of the page layout. Atop that, Clarkey has a booked the print run time so we are now on our final approach.

Sub Strike

Our most recent BTH2 playtest involved a strike by coastal command on a crippled submarine limping its way home along the coast of Norway. It may have sounded like a walk in the park for the guys of the Strike Wing but they hadn't reckoned on the Norwegian based Bf-109s that were able to give the Beaufighters a pretty hairy time.

Initially the beaufighters attention was drawn to a surface ship. It was definitely a minesweeper or sloop of some kind but was it the RN speeding in to finish off the sub or the Kreigsmarine hurrying to the aid of their stricken chum? An overfly soon drew a barrage of flak that convinced the fliers that this ship was no chum of theirs. The flak activity drew in the 109's and soon most of the beaufighters were tangling with the nasty little fellows, and only some terrible shooting by the Jerries saved them from what could have been a nasty mauling. Luckiest of all was Wing Commander 'Winko' White who twice found himself squarely in the sights of Ace Otto Plebb only to have the Luftwaffe man roll so bad that all Winko got was a cracked windscreen.







Meanwhile, a section of Beaufighters that had become detached from the main group sighted something in the water off to the south - the sub! Heaving round in a steady turn that kept them out of the melee further north, Basher Bishop and his four rocket armed beaufighters piled in on the flak firing sub and piled on the damage. A good fun game and a very pleasing playtest.