Camels and Fokkers

 Phil vcame to visit me for a couple of days and we were able to get some troops on the table for a game or two. Just for fun we tried out a World War 1 air combat game.  We used rules from the 'Portable Colonial Wargame' book, slightly adapted for our needs.  We changed the firing from 3 dice per gun to just one dice.  That was because the Germans shot down all of the British aircraft on the first move! The other thing we did was moving single aircraft alternatively, although we need some markers so that we knew which aircraft had moved that turn. A final change was that ones an aircft had started to move the player was not allowed to retrace the move to get a better firing angle, This worked well as estimating where, after 12 moves/turns, the aircraft would finish up.  We had several occasions where aircraft overshot or did not finish up in the correct position to take a shot.

We played the game on a 3" hex mat with six aircraft each.  The dogfights were chaotic with aircraft peeling off in all direction:

A camel arrives at the wrong angle an misses the green and red Fokker.

Aircraft all over the place and the Red Baron has a Camel on his tail!

The aircraft models are all Lledo 'Pioneers of the Air' WW1 fighters.  These were purchases from eBay for a few pounds and a box of clear plastic stands came from the same source.  Having enjoyed the game, I plane to find a better hex mat that will show off the aircraft better; the Camels are quite hard to spot on the WW1 battlefield mat.