Instant Thunder AiW

 I missed the last game of this, but Simon put on another scenario, this time featuring an encounter in 1970 between the Israeli Airforce and 'Syrian' aka, Russian pilots, in the Middle East. Instant Thunder is a fairly abstract air combat game, with the key mechanism being the relative positions of the aircraft, and jockeying for those positions. It reminded of the initiative based combat sequence in Nicks WW2 air combat game..

Russell and I took the forces of progressive socialism, while Tim and John took the reactionary capitalist lackeys. We had eight MiG 21s each armed with cannon and a pair each of heat seeking and radar homing missiles. The enemy had four Mirage III and two Phantoms, also with a mix missiles and guns. Our MiGs were faster than the Mirages but the Phantoms were much better at climbing and far more sturdy. The enemy missiles were also apparently much better than ours, and their radar as well... 

The planes are positioned on this abstract grid on each combat round. King of Hearts is the 'top' and Ace of Spades the 'bottom'. Planes manouvre from the bottom to the top, but fight from the top to the bottom, so the idea if disadvantaged is to manouvre to a position of advantage, while if starting with an advantage, to keep it!

This scenario represents a historical ambush where the IDF sent out some Mirages as bait and hoped to trap and shoot down a number of MiGs. So our guys trundle along in a tight formation of two flights of four in the middle, while the IDF has their Mirages up top and the mighty Phantoms waiting to leap up from below (there is a radar lock advantage firing from below).

Positioning is relative, so when manouvering you can try and move 'along' the rows, or hit the afterburner and jump (or dive) a whole level, or both, depending how good your planes and pilots are. The initial IDF surprise attack failed to score any hits, and suddenly the sky was full of planes scattered across it. For cannon engagements it is good to be on an enemies tail, while missiles have a minimum engagement range. The clouds and sun provide various defensive benefits.

To keep track of who had moved and who had fired, Pete manipulated the counters vertically and horizontally (the whole thing was run on Powerpoint over Zoom).

One of my MiGs (Red 3 I think) got a lock on the Phantom to the right with a heat seeker. The Phantom failed to evade, and suffered devastating damage. The first successful missile attack of the game (the others all had various hilarious failures, failure to lock, failure to hit and even a dud which failed on launch).

The kills were racking up now (the plane counters in the top right). At this point iirc it is two MiGs down to one Mirage and one Phantom. We've got a lot more MiGs though.

Things progressed in much the same vein (I won't bore you with loads more screenshots). We found fairly quickly that the MiGs best bet was to outmanouvre the enemy and get stuck in with their cannon as our missiles were so unreliable. The heat seekers were OK as they were modified by speed and manouverability, and we had an edge over the Mirages, so the remaining MiGs went around trying to pick off the Mirages.

Over the next few rounds (the game limit is eight) we lost a couple more MiGs but also shot down two more Mirages, so the IDF were only left with two planes and decided to call it a day.

That was a very interesting game and I'd certainly like to try it again. Despite the very abstract game board, it did actually feel like you were trying to out manouvre the enemy and the designer had done his best to capture the differences between aircraft and weaponry. There were perhaps a few to many numbers for me, but that is the nature of modern air warfare, and compared to SPIs 'Air War' it was a breeze.