I took the rules along to the club and we played our first games last weekend. I had eight players to handle (!) so the first game was a quick one to get used to the rules. We each had just a single plane to get used to the movement and firing rules - four Spitfire Is against 4 ME-109Es. The RAF handed the Luftwaffe their hats, all four 109s going down for the loss of a single Spit.
For the second game we each took a flight of three or four planes - the Germans had one flight of three ME-110C, the other three each had 4 ME-109E. Opposing them were the combined might of the Low Countries; two Dutch players had 4 Fokker-XXI and three Fokker G-IA, the two Belgians had 4 Gladiator and 4 Hurricane. The ME-110s were embarrasingly wiped out early on - poor coordination saw them bounced by three Allied flights. The Fokker XXIs, which were the only planes capable of altitude 7, stooged around above everyone else and occasionally popped down to level 6 to see how the fight was going. My flight of 109s then blazed a trail across the table, putting paid to the Hurricanes with some fancy manoeuvering, finishing off the remaining Gladiators and hitting the G-IAs hard as well. Unfortunately we ran out of time with the game finely balanced.
Conclusions - well, certainly I think everyone enjoyed it - at least one guy was making plans to buy some Pacific theatre aircraft (we were using Tumbling Dice's excellent 1/600th models).
Obviously we were using mostly home-brewed stats for the aircraft - not many of the models I own have stats in the book. They felt about right however. It would still be nice to be able to confirm that I was using the correct formulae to work the planes out (and of course, I wasn't able to generate any points values). Not being able to generate your own aircraft seems to run counter to the other MJ12 rules we use (Starmada and Iron Stars).
When I get a chance to take some photos I'm going to put them on the club's website and I'll post a link here.
