Amerika Bomber

 Another delightfully tasteful game, "Amerika Bomber" from Compass Games. This is designed as a solo game but we ran it as one of our online team efforts. I gather it has a very short print run and is virtually unobtainable, but Tim obtained one.

A cover worthy of Airfix Magazine, I think those are Me 264s.. The game background is an alt-hist 1947 situation - Germany has conquered Europe but the war with the USA continues, including long range bombing raids mounted from the Azores. This is basically an excuse to field various experimental aircraft (Hortens and such-like), fly them to the US, and bomb stuff. 

Its a classic bomber management game, like B17 and so on, but the detail is delightful. This is the template for an Me 364, a six engined upgrade to the Me 264, featuring such jollity as remote turrets. This is essentially a German B29/B36.  The boxes mark all the various aircraft systems, as well as airframe and wing integrity. Losing these impedes mission success or might result in the loss of the plane.

Our first missions would be in one of these, and if the crew did well, we might be allowed more advanced aircraft. The plane mainly carries conventional bombs, but has space in the bomb bay for an Atomic Bomb, should the Fuhrer grace us with one of those.

Everyone went overboard in the hat front. Jim even managed to fashion an ersatz Luftwaffe uniform with a printed out chest eagle and yellow post-it notes for Luftwaffe collar tabs. I was a lowly Feldwebel (electronic warfare and bombardier!) so just wore my Luftwaffe side cap.

I cant recall who everyone was, I think John was the pilot, Jim the co-pilot, Jerry was a gunner, perhaps Terry was the navigator? The plane had quite a big crew so many people doubled up.

The game runs very much like the solo submarine games - we roll up a mission, then have to navigate to a target and do stuff to it, and then get home. Unlike the submarine games, we aren't looking for things to attack, but trying to avoid enemy fighters and AA. Generally the missions are bombing, but can include stuff like leaflet drops, inserting an agent etc.

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Our first mission was to bomb the Bethlehem Steel Works in Pennsylvania. We had loads of air contacts in and out, carrier launched Bearcats and no less than four P-80 Shooting Stars. Contacts are resolved n the chart above - the attacking planes are assigned to one of the approaches (yellow is vertical, either climb or dive) and the turrets can only hit certain arcs so you need to assign them correctly. 

We managed to down three of the fighters and took moderate damage but made it to the target OK, hit it successfully (30% accuracy) and made it home OK. Somewhere along the way we lost our upper turret but fortunately werent bounced from that direction.

Mission two was to bomb the Big Inch Pipeline Company in Illinois, but we'd only flown two zones over the Atlantic before the plane suffered a total electrical failure and we lost all our electronic systems. We had to abort and return to base, fortunately the weather wasn't too bad so we didn't need the blind landing radar and we got down OK.

Mission three was to attack Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, again we got bounced by P80s but managed to bomb the target and return to base successfully. Our pilot (John) now qualified for a 2nd Class Iron Cross.

The following three missions were in a similar vein, although on mission five we (I) managed to miss the target completely! Sadly on mission six we were turning for home after a successful bomb run and were hit in the wing by P80s (naturally) and one of the fuel tanks caught fire! This wasn't surviveable damage but we were still over land so made an emergency landing near Boston, which was a bit bumpy but we survived. We were all then taken prisoner, for us the war was over.

That was a great game, very enjoyable and worked extremely well as a team game. It was also very timely getting shot down ten minutes before time to pack up, so if/when we do it again we can start with a fresh crew. It rattled along much faster than the U-Boat games as there were fewer contacts to resolve and the fighter and AA engagements were generally fairly short.