Having acquired one of Clipper's might Zeps, I was very keen to get it on the table and so last Tuesday night was the night!
Prior to this I had scoured the Files and the House Rules forums for any extra information I could to add to the material Dave included with my Zeppelin.
As ever, I was amazed at the work forum members had put into research and rules construction based on that research! As ever, I felt the need to cherry pick and build my own rules set. My trusty gaming mates (Baxter, Windy Jack & Mark) agreed to be accomplices on my duel purpose mission of getting my shiny new Zeppelin on the table and also flushing out the inconsistencies/ambiguities in my set of rules! But more on that later.
As a group, we focus on having fun rather than absolute adherence to reality - though tackling a Zeppelin with 3 Sopwith Camels in daylight somewhat bends that criterion!
So, I built my rules to enable for a reasonable pace of play with the minimum amount of book-keeping and dice rolling while still not departing so far that the whole exercise becomes farcical!!
So we set up the table ready for our first foray into the intriguing world of Zeppelins:
The Zeppelin at one end complete with management cards and a set of rules handy for me to annotate as we flushed out errors/ambiguities/missing information etc:
The 3 Camels at the other end mounted on my homemade altitude peg extenders:
What is that monster on the horizon??
The Camels begin their attack run-ups to their prey:
And so it begins with Brown firing while taking return fire from the upper machine gun position and Elwood doing his bit while taking hits from the forward gondola. The white template is an extension piece I made for the Zeppelin base along with a second template for the rear section of the Zeppelin:
A little later in the game, Brown's Camel succumbs and plunges to the earth:
Now it's Ellwood's turn to contribute to the mayhem but, being the lone attacker, he receives the attention from every gun that can be brought to bear on the port side, resulting in a jam (darn!):
Unfortunately Stackard too succumbs to accumulated damage:
As, eventually, does Ellwood
Thus the Zeppelin was a narrow winner, having by now lost 3 of it's 4 engines, having 6 of it's 16 gas cells on fire and sustaining 20 hull damage points. Though I realized later while reviewing our rules amendments that I had forgotten to take A damage cards at the start of each turn for the gas cells fires and so the hull damage should be much greater!
So a good night was had by all (says the Zeppelin driver!!) but we agreed that the rules needed tightening up and also we needed some way of diminishing the punishing effect of the forward upper gun position. In fact we discussed this latter issue for some time after the game concluded - acknowledging that it was a side-effect of not using altitude rules but also acknowledging that it made frontal attacks almost suicidal.
We are re-fighting this game next Tuesday night with some rules tweaks but with the upper forward gun position issue still unresolved. Are there any others who fight against Zeppelins but without altitude rules who have a house-rule to counter this issue?
If anyone is interested in the rules set and Zeppelin management cards I cobbled together by building on the work of others, I'm happy to put them up in the files section.
Oh, and speaking of the work of others, there is a great thread in the WW1 General Discussions forum 'Airship Attack - presenting the LZ41 (L-11)' that is missing all of the linked materials and graphics. Would anyone happen to have copies of these that they have download as the contributor of that thread (Lugburz) doesn't appear to have been active on the forum since 2015.
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