I live in the Sacramento area, and am attempting to get more people interested in aerial gaming with miniatures. Right now, a friend and I are doing mainly Arab-Israeli scenarios centered around the late 1960's to early 1970's; we are using the Phantoms rules supplement, developed from the Mustangs boardgame. More info is available on the Air Pirates Yahoo group. Some of the members of our local club are also planning to put on a Carrier battles game in the near future, using 1/600 - 1/700th aircraft, and warships of an as yet undetermined scale - probably 1/2400th for high level dive bombing attacks, and I'm lobbying for 1/1200th, or larger for torpedo attacks. RESPONSE from Terry Cabak In the Hex Command series of free rules, we are just wrapping up the creation of Hex Command Raptors. We are using 4" hexagons and are testing in 1/144th scale so the planes are really big and nice to look at; We'll be running the games at GenCon. As you can imagine, the average game lasts for 10 or 12 turns which translates to about 30 minutes or no more than one hour per game. These rules were designed post-prop era and have some creative ideas, like players having to record the hex their plane is going to move into each turn for up to three turns. These are "way points." When players are finished, all the planes move where they have been assigned and that's a turn. All that remains is for the pilots to act on missile tones and determine if any targets are in gun range and arc. Next turn after movement again, a dice is rolled for those targets that are still in tone to see if the missile hits; it's that easy. So you see, it's back to being a game again because many of us don't have much time for stuff that's overly detailed. It does use a roster card per plane to keep things organized, though we are tinkering with ideas for physical markers on the table. Right now, the roster card eliminates the need for any markers on the table. Our VERY STRONG desire is to get people gaming air combat too, and this is the precursor to our space combat rules as you would expect. Announcement for the rules completion on The Miniatures Page this week. website http://www.imagineimage.org Back to After Action Review April 2004 Table of Contents Back to After Action Review List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Pete Panzeri. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com