One More Playtest

Last Saturday Kevin and I ran a playtest of the “Hunting the Beast” scenario. Kevin and I set up the board, including some new light flak emplacements from the Fight’s On store. The guys from Fight’s On were kind enough to provide the emplacements, along with some markers to give away to the players at Enfilade. So I want to say a big “Thank You” to them.

A couple light flak emplacements from Fight's On

We were short a player, so there was only two German fighters airborne for the game. The German player chose to add an escort destroyer for some extra light flak, but to keep the flak “tight”, which restricted the range it would attack planes at (for this game flak shoots at any plane that is in range, so the tight restriction allows the German fighters some more maneuver options). The Fleet Air Arm (FAA) chose to make a morning attack with six Barracudas for the bombing, escorted by four Corsairs, and a pair of Fireflys for flak suppression.

After everyone was set up, we made the navigation checks for the FAA and flak manning for the Germans. The FAA ended up missing their check, which shifted their entry point putting them further away from the German fighters, but still in a good position to strike Tirpitz. The German flak was not alerted before the raid and it would take a turn for them to fully man their guns.

The FAA strike enters the map.

The German fighters (a pair of FW-190As) flew off to meet the raid head-on. The high rate of closing speed prevented the FW-190s and escorting Corsairs from engaging each other. Then the German heavy flak opened up.

Heavy flak greets the attackers

The heavy flak showed that it was completely impartial, damaging a few Barracudas along with one FW-190. The FW-190s were able to take a couple shots at some of the Barracudas as they passed, but one of the Barracuda tail gunners was able to hit the flak damaged FW-190 and shoot it down. The heavy flak got a little revenge later by knocking down a couple of the bombers.

The bombers approach the battleship

The Corsairs pursued the other FW-190. It dove away but got too close to escorting destroyer, which promptly shot it down (German flak did a pretty good job of shooting German planes in our playtest). The four remaining Barracudas were able to dodge the flak and drop their bombs on Tirpitz scoring three hits. But that was only enough to damage “The Beast”, not cripple it. So we gave the Germans a marginal victory.

One hit and one miss from this pair of Barracudas

The playtest went pretty well and the players seemed to enjoy the game. We did decide that the flak might be a little too powerful, so we’ll tone it down for the Enfilade game. We also thought that we would give the FAA the option of taking up to eight bombers (instead of six). Overall, I feel pretty good about the scenario and think it is ready to go for Enfilade.