Downtown covers USAF and USN operations in the the middle of Route Package 6 which contained the hardest targets in North Vietnam.  It is well researched and has proved popular with both "normal" gamers and those with "military" backgrounds.  The game is complex and takes a while to get used to.  The DRV player has the biggest challenge and it takes a lot of work to set up a integrated air defence system.

I bought downtown with a direct intention of trying to play this with miniatures.  The game uses (normally) 1 aircraft per flight (and a flight can be any number of aircraft).  Both the living rule book and scenarios are available as free downloads as are a number of playing aids including Solo instructions.  What you need to purchase (to play downtown) are the counters, map and the aircraft stats. 

Upon opening the box it was apparent that I had made the right decision.  Aircraft operate at one of 4 heights (the same as Thud Ridge), operate as flights (which meant the model count would be about the same and the movement rate for a loaded aircraft was about 5 hexes.  I envisaged playing this on a hex mat from Eric Hotz with 2" hexes.  This meant that the ground scale/movement was also about the same as Thud Ridge.

What wasn't good from my perspective was the map being 30"x 22" and my chosen scale being 2" hexes.  The Hotz mat is 37 hexes long by 26 (fully usable) hexes wide (the other two being half hexes) The gaming surface was just too big.  But this is only because of what the game wanted to model.  I could take any scenario (not the campaign games) and with judicous orientation could put it onto the gaming surface.  What it did meant was that I would need a lot of terrain markers and any high ground had to be sufficiently modular to be moved around.

The upshot of this was that, it appeared to be the right scale. It allowed full utilisation of the models I wanted to use as well as having a good support network.  The game is also supported by a Vassal Module which I found vital in moving the game from board to table once all the scenario pieces were plotted.  The downloadable planning maps can also be used if you can't run vassal.

Armed with my new hotz mat, a set of Tumbling Dice USN and USAF aircraft off I went to play.  This page and others will show, hopefully it in action, and if I can get it refined enough you might see it at one of the wargame shows in the South West/South of England as a demo game (never said which year......)

The game website has an extended example of play which you can read here .  The first run throughs would be to see what the table and models looked like and get a feel for what markers I needed (or could I just use the ones from the game).  Images and the results are here so you can judge for yourselves.

First up then.  Scenario D-8 was plotted using the solo rules onto a planning map.  We play this as a two player game but using the solo rules.  It is hard to generate the fog of war when using models and the whole idea was to allow us to get the minis on the table.  One of us would set up the located DRV forces, the other would then do the US planning.  We would then both play the US forces splitting Iron Hand, CAP, Armed Escort, Bombing and EW between us.  Any opposed dice rolls would be done with by the non owning player.  It also means that speed of play increases so we could get a whole raid done in a session.  Using Vassal would also mean we had a play back of the mission for any AAR and just in case we didn't finish we could log the plane locations and carry on.

This gave me the following to work from (map JPEG). The US side was always going to be USN which meant that I could disregard the Western end of the map which is USAF territory.  The final planning factor was the DRV airfields so once plotted it was easy to put the map together on a 6x4 table but most of this space is under utilised as it is manouvre space for the DRV fighters.

D-8 All Tomorrow's Parties  - First of the "proper " scenarios chosen from the programme learning sequence.  USN Alpha Strike goes in.