I am just planning the game for our campaign on saturday. Since we play one game every month we sometimes play a special scenario if something interesting happened at the time during the war.

So on saturday we are playing november 1916. The Oberndorf RAID was a huge bombing Raid with Breuget BM IV bombers and some licensed built Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter bombing far into germany. Lafayette was supporting the raid with 4 Nieuport 17s. On the other side was pilots like Udet and Kissenberth (udet flying a Fokker DIII with a false observer in metal behind him, Kissenberth flying a Fokker DII).

The story is the book: SPA124 Lafayette Escadrille - American Volunteer Airmen in WW1 from Osprey.

Anyways, our germans don't have Fokker DII and DIII but Albatross DII, the DIII model is something I only seen in a resin version for a fortune but since Albatrosses were used at the time they have to do. I also have nothing from the bomber so we will use the stats I found somewhere for the Voison bomber instead, close enough I guess.

We use a tall and small map for the game, on one side we put up the industrial complex (in cardboard models), and as far as we can from then we put up Lafayette and the bombers. Each allied pilot controls one plane and a bomber. The bombers will start at altitude 6 (we use 8) and if the pilot controlling the bomber don't do anything or use a card it will just run straight ahead until it reaches the target, dive to altitude 4, drop its bomb and then the pilot have to turn around and go back.

We give 10 campaign points to a pilot whos bomber actually bombs the factory (whetever he hits or not') and another 10 if he reaches back to the start again, he will also get the last 10 points if he aborts the mission after taking certain amount of damage. The germans will get 10 points for shoting down a bomber after he have bombed or 20 if he shots it before he bombs (and probably 10 for forcing the bomber to abort also, I am thinking about that part). We also awards 25 campaign points to anyone shooting down one of the scouts from the opposite side.

The germans start either at the longside of the map (certain distance from the bombers so they cant shoot directly) or on the airfield we place out in the middle of the map, they can choose any altitude they want to. The game ends when one side have left the map one way or another, but only after the bombs are dropped since we also will place out archies which could shot down the bombers even if it not is likely.

Unfortunatley will my pilot Von Róth (leader of Jasta 9) not join the fun since he is grounded for a month due to a wound. And my other pilot (Donner) is still in a french POW camp so I guess I have to make an alt...

If you have any fun ideas on how to spice things up, post a line

It seems you have some pretty elaborate campaing rules.

Would you care to share them ? :-)

blindAngle said:

I would have to write them all down then ( I plan to do that but havn't had the time yet). But we discussed them in the campaign rules section.

I will post them a bit later anyways

Well, played the raid this morning.

We had only 6 players this time, 3 french/americans and 3 germans. My new pilot got into a duel with a spad early, it kinda ended as a draw. After that me and Fritzl shot down one bomber, he then got a second one just after the first. He got the credit for both since he is more experienced (my star pilot was grounded). Teufel got the third bomber just before it could drop it's bombs.

After that the tide turned, a Nieuport gave me some lead so I decided to land on the airstrip, then another Spad shot me down as I was landing. Luckily I survived with minor injuries. The other 2 did emergency landings with the french in their tails.

But they didn't drop any bombs, the mission was rather good balanced but we might have overestimated how long the bombers should have to fly, might use a little shorter distance if we do it again. Amazingly enough were no scout pilots killed (the bombers were probably all dead but we never checked since it doesn't matter for the campaign).

Erich Geim, my pilot will be grounded november 1916 but it really doesn't matter since Von Róth will be back into action again then.

The Albatross DII and the Nieuport 17 are closly matched, perfect planes to pit against eachother