Bombing Barcelona in the SCW

 A highly tasteful Postcard game, this covers the short lived and largely ineffective Italian bombing campaign against Barcelona in 1938. I was very interested in this as operational air warfare is very hard to simulate well, it is largely attritional with repeated raids against targets and very poor knowledge of the outcomes on the ground. Unlike most air warfare computer, board or  figure games, irl the attrition rate per raid is also vanishingly low, a few percent, with obvious exceptions like Schweinfurt where it approached 20%, which makes it monumentally dull to game at an individual aircraft level if it is to approach any level of realism. The old Bomber Sim, B17 Flying Fortress, cracked me up when our single plane shot down half the Luftwaffe on each mission, but it was fun to play I guess.    

Anyway, this game covers the raids mounted from Mallorca by the 'volunteer' Italian air force. Barcelona is shown by this stylised area map, broken into zones I to VI, which are also the VPs for each zone. To win, the player has to 'demoralise' enough zones that the total adds up to 16 or more, which means effectively hitting a minimum of four zones, and more likely five, as zone V is a hard target. 

To inflict terror from the air, the Italians have two main types available. The first is the well known SM79. In the game these are daylight bombers.

And for night raids, we have the mighty SM81 'Pipistrelle'. This looks like something out of TinTin and has the largest wheel fairings I've ever seen.

The advantage of night raids is a lack of Republican fighters, but the player has to mount two night and four day raids, so the types are pre-determined for each.

Wir bomben auf Spanien! or whatever the Italian equivalent is. The game last six turns and starts with a night raid. Aircraft availability is a simple D6 roll (so 1-6 planes), this mighty raid consists of 6 aircraft!

The demoralise an area, you fly to the target zone and roll 1D6 for each effective plane, needing to roll the VP value of the target zone or more on just one of them. So to hit zone VI, you need one of your planes to roll a 6.

With a 6 plane night raid, an obvious target is zone VI, it has a decent chance of throwing at least one 6. Friction occurs in the form of random item draws, one is drawn for each zone flown, so for Zone VI next to the coast, it is just one, in this case, and air raid shelter.

In contrast, Zone IV is three zones away so would draw three events, including fighters, heavier air raid shelters, but also some beneficial ones like a lorry full of explosives (!) and the French Vice Consul(!!). The bad events reduce the number of effective aircraft.

The little white numbers next to zones I, III, IV and V are flak. Flak also reduces the number of effective aircraft. Generally the rating is -1, but zone V is -2 (ouch).  If you manage to demoralise Zone IV, it also suppresses the Flak (the main flak positions are up on the ridge above Barcelona city), reducing the effect by one step.

After a five turns of bombing, Russell amassed the requisite 16 demoralisation points, a virtuoso performance!

Pete, John and I then took it turns to try again. Both Pete and I managed to get 16 points on the very last turn, but John ran out of time.

That is a very clever game around a hard to simulate subject. There are plenty of decision points, which feel realistic, and the outcome is far from certain. Having to fly a whole series of missions, repeat failed ones etc gives a much better feel for operational air warfare than a single mission game. 

We then fell into a discussion about other situations the mechanism might be applied to, one interesting suggestion being the Siege of Paris in 1870. 

Very engaging and thought provoking. Recommended.