"The Speed of Heat" components are rolling in from the printers and Phil Boinske, of Clash of Arms Games, says shipping of advance mail orders will begin the first week in July. I have now personally seen the box wraps and I like them. The cover painting features a camoflaged and sharkmouthed F-4E Phantom starting into a climbing scissors with a silver MiG-19 somewhere over North Vietnam. Unfortunately, I think the Phantom crew might just be over-extending themselves a bit as they are still carrying six 5001b. bombs and have no heaters.
Well, that's just my opinion but hey, the MiG has a lot of energy judging from the vortices coming off its wingtips and dirty loaded-up Phantom's aren't, in my experience, good dogfighters. Neither are dirty loaded-up A-7s for that matter. Come to think of it, even a clean A-7 sucks in a dogfight, as I was recently reminded during an exercise with Illinois Air Guard F-16s.
GMT Games will be releasing two new air combat games sometime soon. One is titled is titled "Down in Flames!" and is described as a multi-player card game about air combat in World War I and World War II. The other is titled "Corsair Leader" and is a solitaire game set in the Paciftc in World War II that will use a derivative of the "Hornet Leader" solitaire game system. If you haven't tried either "Hornet Leader" or "Thunderbolt/Apache Leader," I can heartily recommend them as good fun and entertainment for those times when you are suffering from a lack of available opponents for your favorite face-to-face air combat games. Both are easy to play and include enough detail that you feel as if you are playing something more than a mere beer-and-pretzels game.
Clash of Arms Games has decided to pick up Larry Bond's World War Two Naval Miniatures Rules system, which is titled "Murderer's Row" and which will consist of multiple sets of booklets, each covering a different theater of the war. I have gone through and looked over Larry's draft of the rules and I can say that they look pretty good. From what I can tell, they will probably be compatible with his "Harpoon" game system as well. A lot of streamlining has been done to gunnery and air combat in order to keep the die rolling down -- a necessity with the gun battery-intensive ships and large air battles of World War Two. Clash of Arms will be attending Atlanticon 92 at the University of Maryland over the July 4th weekend. Check out their display and pick up a copy of "The Speed Of Heat!".
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© Copyright 1992 by J.D. Webster
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