Christmas game: Scramble!

Besides having some booze the Gemigabok Christmas games (almost every organization in Finland tends to organize pre-Christmas parties) have traditionally often involved games of several aspects of warfare, ie gemigabok in land, sea and air, but this year we decided to stick with the air theme.

After our success with the WWI campaign played with Canvas Eagles rules we've been discussin about finding a WWII aerial game that is fast and has a good feel to it. Also running a Winter War campaign has been discussed, but with a different approach than the previous campaign where players were playing either Allies of Central Powers. Perhaps every player might be able to have their own Finnish flight and if the flight wasn't active the player would then be playing the opposing Soviet planes. Also when using just Soviet bombers most likely no player would be actually needed for them...

In light of this Aksu has been pining for quite long time to give the Scramble! -rules a try. To this effect he also prepared the necessary 1/300, or 6mm, planes and two scenarios.


The first scenario was kinda themed for the event, it being a Winter War battle. It featured two flight of three Soviet SB-2s on a bombing run and two sections of Finnish Fiat G.50s trying to down them.

Here we have all the Finns concentrating on the righmost SB-2 flight.
Scratch one bomber! However the other SB-2 formation manages to slip past the Finns and bomb the target with little harrasment.
The second game had a section of Finnish Blenheims on raid escorted by two Fiats and intercepting these were three Soviet I-153 Chaikas with one of the pilots being a veteran from Spanish Civil War flying a newer model of the plane. This was supposed to be a Winter War game too, but as Aksu had erranously painted the Blenheim's with green/black camo (instead of plain green) it was decided that the battle was from Continuation War.

The Soviet veteran is harrasing the Blenheims on the end of their bombing run but is tailed by Fiat in turn. One of the Soviet wingmen is trying to get on Fiat's case too, but is still way too high. I think the remaining fighters were badly damaged and more or less withdrew from the action.

We used the random initial placement and this clearly gave the bombers a HUGE advantage, especially as the bombers used were quick and the fighters weren't. In future games rolling table will have to be used as movement distances per turn are so long.

The games went pretty well and the system is not that different from the free ruleset, Sturmovik Commander. However I'd be willing to bet that Sturmovik Commander is somewhat quicker. Both are definately good systems that we'll have to replay. Preferably immediately after one another. Perhaps we could even incorporate some of the better features from one to another?

-Janne
(Played: November 24th GM: Aksu. Also present: Eero, Janne, JaNNe, Mr H. & Mr V)