Blood Red Skies - A Tale of Two Adolfs (or Adolphs)

One of the features of Blood Red Skies, the new WW2 air war game, is the inclusion of Aces. In addition to the Squadron Boxes (which I did mention a few weeks ago), each nation in the game gets a named Ace in an Ace Expansion box. The main rules allow you to create Aces, but the named ones are more potent, and more expensive in points too.

Each Ace expansion includes one aircraft model, base and aircraft stat card (identical to the ones in the Squadron), a sheet of stickers (ditto), an Ace card explaining his or her skills, plus the relevant Skill and Trait cards. and Skill Discs and counters.  They retail at £12.00 each from Warlord Games , which is ok but looks a bit pricey for a single model when compared to the 6 plane Squadron box at £20.00, but then again no one is forcing you to buy  them and they do add an extra dimension to the game.

The British Ace is Adolph "Sailor" Malan, a South African who served in the RAF and was for a time the highest scoring RAF fighter pilot, with 27 kills. Malan is a good shot with an interesting ability "Set them Up" that helps friendly pilots flying with him, but he is no slouch when it comes to shooting with the "Killler Instincts" skill that converts close range hits to criticals. All this comes at a hefty price of 166 points (135 for the pilot and 31 for his Spitfire) just over twice as much as a regular pilot & plane.

His German opponent is Adolf Galland, the oft quoted senior pilot who ended up as General der Jagdflieger, the highest rank of fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe, amassing 104 Kills along the way. Galland is particularly interesting in that he is the only Ace in the game so far who has a specific mention of flying jets (as he did at the end of the War). That obviously shows Warlord are planning ahead, but also that it may be possible to transfer Aces to aircraft other than the ones in the Ace expansion. This makes sense, Galland flew several types of Bf109, not just the E included in this set, and also Me262s.  Galland is a more traditional pilot who excels at deflection shooting using his "Snap Shot" skill and is hard to tail because he has "Sixth Sense". like Malan he is expensive - 166 points in total in his 109E

I've already painted up my Spitfires and Bf109s from the starter set. The Spitfires are in the markings of 602 Squadron (City of Glasgow) and my 109s are a generic Luftwaffe scheme - I regretted this almost immediately as it would have been easy to go with a specific unit but I got carried away and painted some rather non historic yellow wingtips . Decals from the Spitfires were from MiscMinis in the US who provided an excellent, speedy and very cheap trans Atlantic service, and the German  markings were from Mehusla's store on ebay 1:144 Direct , who again provided an excellent service. (Side note here - I have used Mehuslas decals numerous times before, and he does a couple of RAF Squadron sets. but I think he was caught napping by the massive spike in demand that happened when BRS was released and struggled initially to keep everything in stock - one of the reasons I tried MiscMinis for the Spitfire decals. Thankfully he seems to have restocked several times so the Great Decal Shortage of Spring 2018 is now at an end here in the UK)

Anyway, back to Adolph and Adolf.  It seemed a good idea to paint the planes up to represent the "real" thing as much as possible. With Malan this means 74 Squadron, and Galland JG26 and I ordered decals from Miscminis who happily do both. I also decided to try and make the Aces a bit different to the normal Squadron aircraft, so I decided to try painting them in different but reasonably historic colour schemes.

For Malan I decided to try the early black & white underside. This scheme predated the Battle of Britain and was mainly used in France, but 74 Squadron certainly had it, and it was different to the duck egg undersides on my 602 Squadron Spitfires.

For Galland I wanted full on light blue with a hard edge upper surface. Galland flew several different Bf109Es during the period and this had the advantage of standing out a bit from the others and also ticking the "Airfix" nostalgia box. I've cheated a little and included his personal Mickey Mouse style emblem which may not be quite 100% accurate but I'm not feeling that concerned.

OK at this point I need to come clean. I didn't paint the models from the Ace boxes as Aces, I painted them as normal planes, which helps explain in part the odd numbers in some of the pics. This is because last year Warlord kindly sent me a couple of resin prototypes to have a look at, and they have languished in a box ever since. I decided to paint these up as the Aces. Apart from the material being different the plastic and resin models are to all intents identical, so I thought "why not?" Actually that's not 100% true. the prototypes have a different (hexagonal) hole for the flying bases. Fortunately this was an easy fix as it had been pointed out to me that the Hawk Wargames "widget" fitted over the BRS base very well, so it was a simple job to drill out a 3mm hole and glue a widget in, so the Aces actually stand a couple of mm taller on their advantage stands.

Here are the finished planes

Galland looking a bit bright blue, and a subdued Wing Man

Malan and his 74 Squadron Wing Man

I'm quite happy with how they turned out

So are the Ace expansions good in the game I hear you ask? BRS isnt going down the XWing route, with ever more expansions that you need to have to be "competitive" - theyre trying to stick within reason to the history. The Aces are good, but the points premium would make me think seriously about including them every time. Nice to have as an option, but not game breaking, which is how it should be.

I'm sure we will see more Aces in future, both for the current models and also for new releases.
       
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