Gearing up!

As last week, blog-wise this has been a tranquil week. Behind the scenes, however, a storm is brewing as I am gearing up to have the first go with the revised Bag the Hun 2-rules I have been working on. Since Friday last week (and my last post) not a night has gone by without some time being spent printing, cutting and sleeving game aids - mainly the cards that constitute the aircraft records and damage effects.

Now, with the game aids sorted, I suddenly find myself short of time. Still remaining are:

1. Assemble additional flight stands
2. Prepare bogey markers
3. Prepare tokens and markers, including pipe cleaner smoke trails and matched pairs of tailing markers

For the flight stands, all the material is available and assembly generally goes quickly. The bogey markers I plan to make out of a stack of old, disused poker chips collecting dust in the basement. Not only do they have the right size for the hex map, they are also red and blue and have an indentation in the middle where it would be ideal to attach a circular paper label with identification number and directional arrow. An idea is to label the white chips from the same set with numbers only, allowing them to be placed face down on the individual aircraft record cards - thus eliminating the need for a written record of the bogeys.

Hm, I might need more chips...

For the tokens, I have some gaming bits and pieces from discarded board games that I can label with matching numbers and other effects. Being an occasional pipe smoker, good-quality conical pipe cleaners is also something that is readily at hand. All I have to do now is secure some time to actually get these things ready - and time is getting short. The Luftwaffe are already over the Channel, and Hurricanes scramble from the green fields of Kent...

Before signing off, here is a peek at the cards I have made. Unfortuneately, the cards and other game aids contain rather a lot of gaming information, so I do not want to put them up for download before I have cleared that with the Lardies. Most of the cards assume BtH 2 Lite: BoB will be used, so the text is altered or incomplete compared to regular BtH 2 at any rate.

Regular deck: Fronts are standard printer paper, backs are some old, heavy, gloss photo paper selected to give the cards some substance. Cards are designed using Excel spreadsheet, images are collected using Google image search and decidedly used without permission. As you can see, I much prefer the original "Tally Ho!" and "Achtung Spitfire!" to the current generic bonus formation move card text...

Damage cards. Fronts are regular printing paper, back is 160 g card. Coloured differently to quickly separate them from the regular cards. Printing the fronts separately on inexpensive paper rather than costly card makes it far more affordable to reprint cards when necessary. The "Wing Damage" is a typical simplification made when I revised the BtH 2 rules into the "Lite" variant - the original text is "Aileron or wing damage".

Mulitples of each damage card have been made so that they can be placed with the aircraft record cards below as required.

Aircraft record cards: Although it is quite immodest, I will have to admit to liking these a lot! Each aircraft has a separate card. Identification panel is identical to the section move, fire and leader cards to aid in recognition. All aircraft stats and special rules are listed on the front. The reverse has a line drawing with fire arcs, on these cards straight ahead for the Hurricane, front and rear quarters for the Do17z. The Dornier, being a multi-engine design, also has numbered engine positions with two checkboxes on each to record damaged and destroyed engines. Pilot skill is recorded with a checkbox, and ammunition is also kept track of using boxes. The opportunity to record bogeys by placing a matched chip face down on each card I consider a bonus.

That is all for now. here is hoping the next update is an after action report...!