A Wing And A Prayer Bombing The Reich

by

Lock 'N Load Publishing 

 The introduction in the manual starts out "A Wing and a Prayer Bombing the Reich is an easy, fast playing solitaire game placing YOU in command of a squadron of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers stationed in England during World War II, starting from 1942 through the end of the war." Let's see how close this statement is when actually playing the game.

 The first thing I want to mention is that this review is based on the new version 2.2 manual. 'A Wing and a Prayer' is actually both a solitaire, and a two player game. The player commands the aforementioned squadron of Allied bombers (you can also choose B-24s) during the Second world war. With solitaire play, the dice and cards determine what the enemy flak and fighters do. When playing the two player version, the second player takes over the German forces. 

 The map is of northern France and Germany, and uses a point  to point movement system to get your bombers over the target. As the errata in the manual shows, there is still a problem with the spelling of four cities on the map. I have to stress that this is the only place where the errors occur and it does not affect game play in the least. 

 The components, including the map, are very well done as far as quality of the items and the art work. The map is actually 19" x 25". The counters are sized 1" square, and uncluttered with only four numbers on the bomber counters in the corners. There are three counter sheets for a total of 189 counters. The counters also come with clipped edges for us sticklers. The game comes with seven full sized player aid cards. The tables and writing in the manual and the other components are large and easily read. In the back of the manual there are six pages of logs etc. that can be photocopied, and they can also be downloaded from Lock 'N Load's web page.

 The manual itself is well written and thirty-two pages long. With it and the player aids, one should not have to keep referring back to it for rule clarifications. 

 Like other games about the bombing campaign your job as commander, as in real life, is to manage your crews against the damage you can inflict on targets. Your crews will face flak, fighters, and weather.

 There has been some postings about games like this 'playing themselves'; they feel the player does not have enough input into the game once the mission starts. The answer to that has also been posted. That pretty much was what it was like for a commander in the bombing war. Just like the game, you were given a target and picked the crews and the flight pattern. Beyond simply scrubbing the mission because of losses or weather, there was not much else to do. Your goal in the game is to keep enough crews to make sure the next missions get done.

  

The sequence of play, for single player, is:

Adjust the mission turn counter

Mission deck - add or subtract to mission deck due to year

New escort fighter types -  check on the mission turn track to see if   new fighters are available

War progress events check - check the mission turn track for these

Target for today - Draw a mission card

Target cloud cover - roll die for this check

Assign bombers and crews

Coordinate escort - check mission card

Once you are aloft this is the sequence:

Move bomber formation -  to next hex

Lead bomber and formation adjustment - adjust bomber                   formations if necessary

Loose formation check -  formation can be loose or tight

Damaged aircraft checks

Escort fighters range check - check your hex against the escorts range

Escort rendezvous site check

Flak site attack check  - if Flak is present in hex

Formation event check - check for formation events

Conduct air combat 

Repeat the above until you get to the target hex

Conduct bombing run

Return to base- repeat the above sequence until back at your base hex

Land aircraft

Once your planes have landed:

Clean up - reset board etc. for next mission

Victory points

Damaged bomber replacement and repair

Crew experience and recovery

War progress

Game end

 

  I will go through a mission turn next.

  The board is all setup and the next step is to choose the target for today's bombing run. The mission will be from 1942 to make it simple. The mission turns seem like the player has a lot to remember, but the game is simpler than it looks as far as having to keep track of things. Naturally, your first few turns will take longer until you get the process down pat.

 The following pics show the game map, formation card, and the squadron briefing card setup for our first mission. Thanks to Lock 'N Load I was able to download and print another squadron briefing card. The first one was lost in a small coffee flood. 

 This mission is going to be over Meaulte. I have six B-17s to use. The game starts you off with one crack, two veteran, and nine green crews. The green crews are not named as the veteran and crack crews are. My crack crew is naturally 'Memphis Belle', and my two veteran crews are 'Hell's Angels' and 'Jack the Ripper'. For escorts in 1942 you have P-47s that have a range of six. I have four escorts available due to lucky rolling. You also roll and check for 'fighter aces' with your escorts, and also with enemy fighters. Unfortunately I rolled no fighter aces for my escorts. Nothing has happened over the two channel spaces, and luckily over Lille the die roll for a flak attack came up nil. 

  Now we get to the bombing mission itself. You first check the mission card for the flak rating of the target. In this case Meaulte has a rating of fourteen. So then we check the 'combat table' to see how many one die rolls we roll against each bomber to check for flak damage. In this case it is three rolls, and each roll of six indicates damage. I have lucked out once again, and suffered no incoming flak damage. Remember this is still early in the war and I am not making a bomb run against deep enemy targets. I still have to check on 'egress' flak after our bombing run and also see if enemy fighters attack my bombers. The roll for enemy fighters puts one FW-190 in the air against us, and it is also piloted by an ace. We can use two interceptors against him and our luck is still holding out. The FW-190 is destroyed. 

 Now we get into the bombing run itself. Unfortunately, because of only six bombers and the fact that Meaulte is under heavy cloud cover, the bombers score only two hits and inflict no damage. The egress (thank you P.T. Barnum) flak does no damage either. Our trip back home over Lille again and then over the channel is uneventful. 

  The game to me is an excellent representation of the bombing campaign. Once your target and crews were chosen there was not much else to do but hang on tight and pray. The players' choices  before the mission starts are the largest factor in how your mission will go. Of course, with this many die rolls to check each time you move into a new hex, lady luck does have a large part to play in it. There are also die rolls that can give you a 'lady luck' counter to be used during your flight. I have not had a chance to play it as a two player game. As the German player you have the chance to increase the flak attacks, and you are in charge of your interceptors. You are not allowed to change history by, for example, building more ME-262s, or building them sooner. Actually both sides pretty much play exactly the hands that history dealt the people whose shoes they are filling. This is my first Lock 'N Load boardgame, and I have to say I am impressed.  I have played a lot of their different digital games like 'Command Ops' etc. down through the years, and have really enjoyed them. The AI in them is amazing. 


Robert

Command: Shifting Sands is the latest stand alone expansion for the massively detailed naval and combat simulator that is Command: Modern Air/Naval Combat (CMANO). Developed by Warfare Sims and published by Matrix/Slitherine, CMANO is a powerful simulator that lets the player explore detailed scenarios depicting air and naval combat of every stripe since WW2 to the present and even a little beyond. Just about every ship, aircraft and submarine that has ever been built is in the game database. The primary drawback is that CMANO has a hefty price tag. There also isn't a demo, so to give curious players a chance to get their hands on the gameplay without too much of a hit to the wallet, the developers have put out several stand alone campaigns. The other two, Chains of War and Northern Inferno, featured hypothetical conflicts. Shifting Sands, on the other hand, features the numerous historical battles between Israel and its not so friendly neighbors over the course of several decades. While you won't have access to the full CMANO database, you do get to play with toys from a few different technological time periods. In several cases these scenarios depict the historical first use of some new weapon or tactic.

As mentioned, Command is a real-time simulation of air and naval combat, calculating for just about every variable you could imagine. Real time as in the game literally ticks by one real second at a time unless you speed it up. Direct ground combat is depicted to a much lesser degree, though there is no shortage of targets on the ground and things like anti-aircraft units shooting back at you. The game sacrifices a great deal in one area to make its extremely broad scope possible, the graphics. This is a game involving a lot of map staring, as simple icons representing units move around and fire little dots at each other. What the game lacks in cinematic visuals it more than makes up for with some serious number crunching going on under the hood. This game includes more details than I could possibly discuss here, but just to name a few: terrain, weather over a ground target, the temperature of the water at various depths, airspeed and weight with regards to fuel consumption, realistic time needed to rearm and refuel aircraft, and the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow all play a factor. Okay, maybe not that last one. The key point being that the developers have attempted to include just about every significant factor involved in the operations depicted. You very well may need to do some homework to fully understand what is happening in the game. Fortunately, Command makes it easy to at least get started.

Shifting Sands comes with several training scenarios, and a newbie player will be wise to go through them all more than once while keeping the manual open in another window. This will get you familiar with the core mechanics, however it won't teach you much about how to conduct a large scale complex operation on your own. There are a few great sets of videos on YouTube which can help in that regard. This is the mark of a truly great wargame: the game gives you all the tools you need to simulate a realistic battle scenario, but requires you to actually develop and employ realistic tactics to succeed. Simply launching every aircraft you have and throwing them at the enemy won't get you very far at all. You will need to analyze the situation and deploy your units with a degree of precision if you want to make a good showing. Learning all of these tactics and stratagems is part of the experience of playing the game, and shouldn't scare anyone away. I think most people buying a game like this do want to learn about those sorts of things, and the game will reward you for it.

The mechanics of the game might look overwhelming at first, but really you can get started without delving too deeply into the dozens of options and functions available. As the commander, your job isn't to micromanage every unit and weapon. The AI can do a decent enough job as long as you give it the right orders. This is done simply by choosing an area or target for a mission and then assigning units to it. There are default mission types set up for just about everything you might need, from anti-submarine warfare to air superiority ops. Within each mission, you can tweak all the finer points. Do you want aircraft to launch in flights of two or three aircraft each? Do you want your ships to investigate and potentially engage targets out side of their designated patrol zone or should they stay put? You can also set the rules of engagement and behavior for the AI at the unit and mission level, and also general orders for your entire side. These settings tell the AI how to act in various situations so that you don't have to manually intervene constantly. 

Once you have a grip on the basics, the game lets you go much deeper. For example, a ground strike mission can be built by the player selecting exactly which aircraft in a group will target which buildings and with what weapons down to the exact number of bombs dropped. You can also plot a course and set altitude and speed. Taking control like this will let you pull off much fancier maneuvers and likely see better success in the more complex scenarios. And Shifting Sands will give you more than a few complex scenarios to deal with. 

The campaign starts off with a little taste of naval action during the Suez Canal Crisis and then a solid air combat scenario that requires you to perform recon, attack, defense, and air superiority missions all at once but is still manageable. After that, it's off to the races with scenarios such as Operation Focus, the opening move of the Six Day War in which the Israelis historically destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force. The naval scenarios tend to be much less complex, due to the smaller numbers of units involved, but are still made interesting because one major error could cost you the win. This is also an area of the world that has a ton of civilian shipping, making it tricky to pick out foes until they are either dangerously close or already firing at you. That said, the aircraft focused missions are the star of the show here. While you can play through the campaign in chronological order, you can also just pick out the scenarios you are most interested in from the list. The only difference when playing the campaign is that you must reach a certain score threshold to unlock the next mission. This should serve as a good challenge for even experienced players, since simply coming out ahead in a scenario is not enough to hit that score. You will need to accomplish all or most of your objectives while avoiding taking too many casualties.

There are also a few interesting "what-if" scenarios that round out this pack. One gives you a chance, as the Israelis, to use nuclear weapons in a last ditch effort to hold the line. Another puts you in command of the US 6th Fleet on the day the USS Liberty was attacked by the Israeli military, and in this scenario the United States responds very harshly. These are great examples of what can be done with Command system. not only can it simulate events that did happen historically, it can be used explore all sorts of hypothetical scenarios that might have played out. Of course, to access the hundreds of community scenarios that have been made over the past few years, you'll need to buy the full version CMANO. I think Shifting Sands serves as a great entry point for those curious. It's also a decent buy for veteran commanders. They get 17 well made scenarios to add to their collection, and can continue to support the develop of the system overall.

So, if you are looking for a detailed air and naval combat simulator, and don't mind the minimal graphics and sound, you really can't do better than Command. The game has been continuously updated since its release about three years ago, and Shifting Sands benefits from all of those updates. This is a great way to try out the system and see if it's for you, without plonking down $80 or waiting for a big sale. Though if you like Shifting Sands, I highly recommend getting CMANO, it's a game that you could spend years tinkering with and learning new things from. There are so many community scenarios available that the average gamer would take a lifetime to play them all. Definitely some serious bang for your buck.

Matrix Store: Link Here
Developer Website: http://www.warfaresims.com/
Command: Shifting Sands is also available on Steam.


- Joe Beard


P.S. I had to borrow my screenshots for this review from the official page, since my normal means of capturing them didn't seem to agree with Command and came out rather useless. I had some really good ones too!

This book, as the only review on the cover states, is absolutely 'an amazing story'. The author, who is somewhat famous, as far as Prisoner of War escapees goes, takes us through his war experince being a PoW in Nazi Germany. B A James was serving on No. 9 Squadron for just two months before being shot down over Holland. The book starts dramatically with:

The parachute opened with a crack pulling me out of my terminal velocity dive with a jerk which seemed to tear me apart and then I was floating gently two miles up in the night sky over Holland. The stricken Wellington, of which I had lately been the second pilot, had been turned into a  flaming hell by the pounding flak shells and was streaking away to the east trailing fire and smoke ... on course for a target it would never reach.

 I was hooked after that opening paragraph and read the book, spell-bound the entire time. I have come to the conclusion that there is no way I, nor anyone I know, would have survived with such dignity and humour as is evident in the pages of this book. However, this is no joke book. The way in which Jimmy recounts his horrific experience is done with no animosity or malice towards his captors. And his 'voice' sounds like someone who would catch anyone's undivided attention. I can imagine him holding court in a country pub somewhere. 

The Wellington

To prove how generous this young pilot was, towards the very end of the book, at which point his and his captor's fortunes had almost completely reversed, Jimmy recounts the 'almost gentlemanly treatment we had received in Prisoner of War Camps'.  My draw dropped at that statement, the words I had read didn't tally with the gentlemanly treatment he claimed.

This isn't a book about living in Prisoner of War camps, this is about escaping from those camps. Jimmy had 13 different escape attempts to his name and was a prisoner in 9 different camps. His most famous escape was as part of The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III. In fact, it was Jimmy's job to disperse much of the soil from 'Harry' which was dug under his hut.

One of the most horrific escapes in the book was what the author called 'mole tunnels'. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but if you do I would recommend you skip this section. A mole tunnel is dug by one escapee moving soil from in front of them to behind them until they think they've gone far enough. I can't even fathom how that is possible, but I suppose there is no telling just how resourceful humans can be in the face of desperate odds.

'Harry'

I am always dumbfounded when I read about the tunnels that were dug with the most basic of equipment. In tunnelling out of Sachsenhausen Jimmy and his co-conspirators only had a table-knife with a DIY serrated cutting edge as their only implements in which to cut through his floor and dig the tunnel. Just how? I would love to know; It doesn't seem possible. In fact, the resulting tunnels considering the tools they were dug with are technological marvels. They were shored-up, had electric lighting, air pumps, railways and stations!

Through Jimmy's travels through German PoW Camps he occasionally butts up against the Nazi death and concentration camps. His response to those sights feels like a very archaic mechanism to deal with personal distress. In today's world, we're encouraged to talk, to grieve and admit our stress. Jimmy, at one point, recounts how if he let any melancholy infect his disposition the war, for him, would be over, and in seeing the absolute worst that humanity could do to itself, he actively pushed those dark thoughts away.

I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone. It's a quick read and a very interesting read. If you're at all interested and/or amazed by the ingenuity of humans, and/or horrified by just how horrible we can be to each other then you should read this book. After I finished the book, I was reminded of a question I have never found a satisfactory answer to; that is, how did the Nazi doctrine become accepted to the extent that the Concentration camp guards only defence at their subsequent war crimes trial was 'orders are orders'. How did the guards not realise their own atrocities? Any way I digress...

This is a great book and you can pick up the latest edition at Pen & Swords website for £14.99. 

Fokker Dr.I The Aces' Aircraft

 by

Tomasz J. Kowalski and Marek Rys 

 The Fokker Dr.I, short for dreidecker  (triplane), was the German answer to the Sopwith Triplane. The German pilots were alarmed at the superiority of the British triplane to their aircraft. Per the book, Manfred von Richtofen said " the Sopwith Triplane is the best aircraft the enemy has, it has a high climb rate, is more maneuverable, does  not lose altitude in turns and is faster in a dive."

 As the book shows, the Fokker Dr.I first appeared in late summer of 1917. The first month's combat testing showed two flaws of the Dr.I. One of these flaws was that the German rotary engines were not as good as the Entente's. Some of the triplanes were actually fitted with captured enemy rotary engines. The second flaw was that the top wing suffered some failures that even  caused some fatalities. This was found to be because of moisture, and the subsequent failure of the glue and fabric of the wings. Yes, you read that correctly, these old birds were made of canvas, wood, and sometimes held together with glue; actually, even some World War II planes were. The moisture problem was taken care of by having added ventilation holes in the wing, and an improvement on the seam gluing.

 The third flaw of the triplane was known even before either side had even produced one. The flaw was the increased drag of a third wing. The world's engineers had known before World War I that a monoplane was the best design for a plane. Unfortunately, they had to make do with what could be produced and actually manufactured at the time. So the Dr.I was as nimble as a cat, but slower than most planes. By 1918, the Entente's fliers had much better aircraft, and could use 'boom and zoom' tactics against the Dr.I. Once the Allied fliers learned not to dogfight a Dr.I, its days were numbered. The slower speed of the Dr.I meant that the German fliers could not break off engagements or escape if things started to go south. 

 The book is separated into two parts. The first thirty-six pages is a history of the plane along with many pictures of Dr.I's during the war. The second part of the book is 103 pages of computerized views of the entire plane's separate parts in detail. Some of these are in 3D, and the book comes with a small pair of 3D glasses. To illustrate the amount of views, there are ten pages alone on the machine guns and ammo bins from all angles. The computerized views will allow any hobbyist to pretty much build a Dr.I from scratch if they wanted to. As with any of the Kagero books you will find not only interesting history, but also jaw dropping illustrations of whichever war machine that is being depicted.

Robert

Book: Fokker Dr.I The Aces' Aircraft 

Authors: Tomasz J. Kowalski and Marek Rys 

Publisher: Kagero

Distributor: Casemate Publishers