Check your 6! is an air combat simulation of the 1925-1947 era and can be played with any aircraft from this era, including the early jets.
Movement is planned ahead and simultaneous. This makes the game very suitable to play with many players. It uses a maneuver template similar in form to Blue Max / Canvas Eagles.
CY6 requires airplane models which can be of any scale - 1/72, 1/144, 1/300 or 1/600 - and a hexagonal mapboard. Or it can be played with cardboard counters on a hexboard.
Individual pilot skills matters in this game. As Chuck Yeager said: “It’s the man, not the machine!”.
2007 Origins Awards Winner, Historical Miniatures Game of the Year.
If you don’t like pre-plotted moves then you can simply move the planes in the Move Group priority order without plotting as their turn comes up. The approach would not change any major major
mechanics but you would loose one of the major advantages of the game which is that folks can all decide what they want to do at the same time rather than waiting for folks one by one. I think the “no plot” approach would work fine for small games with folks who know how to play but would be a pain for big con games with new players.
Tailing works almost exactly like Blue Max - the tailed player must reveal some information to the tailing player prior to the move.
Cheers,
Scott
All -
I just wanted to post the following two messages on this list as there seem to be several threads on TMP about CY6!. The first is my response that talks about Robustness (how tough a plane is in CY6), I thought that some of you might be interested in it. The second is from George about his Historicon experience (I am pretty sure George would not mind me posting it here).
Cheers, Scott
______SCOTT________
Thanks for the kind words for the game – we certainly worked hard to model reality as close as possible without bogging down play.
In the comments above it seems there is one that says the aircraft are damaged too easily and one that says they are not damaged easily enough. I will try to address both.
Not easy enough to damage: We took the damage model pretty seriously and decided that to make the game play quickly there are only four states that really matter (at least for CY6!). They are 1)”ok”, 2)”destroyed” 3)”engine damage” and 4)”airframe damage”. Numbers 1&2 are self explanitory. For numbers 3 and 4 we decided that minor hits that don’t drastically impact the aircraft don’t really matter that much and will only slow down play – we decided to make “damage” a state that would really impact play and would roughly equate to when most pilots would disengage. We even toyed with rules to make you disengage when damaged but figured that the way the victory points work, you are mostly silly to stick around (a fighter that is damaged is worth 1 victory point, destroyed it is worth 4). Of course, there can always be that one in a million shot (the magic BB) that takes a plane down with a fuel explosion etc, and those who played know this is reflected in the Lucky Hit Table.
As for aircraft that seem too fragile: I think folks should note that we played all our demo games with A6M Zeros, Gloster Gladiators and CR.42s – all these planes have an R0 robustness rating, making them the most fragile aircraft in the game. We chose these planes for the demo game so that the demos would have some “action”. I am confident that when players try to shoot down a FW-190 (with Robustness R2) or better yet a B-17 (with Robustness R4) it will be a quite different story. We used the curve of the 2x d6 distribution to make R4s much more difficult than R3s etc…
Thanks again for all the comments – it is fun to see the reaction to the game we worked so hard on.
Cheers, Scott
______GEORGE_______
I had a chance to play the demo game and watch a couple of bigger games. I like the game a lot and picked up a copy of the game and some planes and flight stands. The stands seemed a bit expensive but there are always other options. One of the dealers had starter packs of stands, planes (6 each) and decals. The sets were 6 of one type of plane and I would have preferred to have seen at least one starter that had, say, 3 wild cats and 3 zeros instead of two boxes with 6 of each. The gentlemen doing the demos did a great job of explaining the rules and making everyone feel welcome, despite the players experience level. Scott really went out of his way to answer my questions and explain the logic behind the rules (this was also done in the rules and really helped understand where the designer is coming from. I wish more game companies did this).
As far as the game itself goes, it plays fast after a brief explanation and after a few turns, everyone in the session I played in was pretty up to speed and were able to continue with minimal questions. Unfortunately, understanding the rules didn’t help keep me from getting really shot up and eventually stalling out and falling out of the dogfight ;) The emphasis seems to be on pilot’s skill and ability and I like that aspect. There is plenty of data for number crunchers though about the different planes. There are different data or manuever sheets, I think 5, for different classes of planes and there are rules that differentiate planes within these. Altitude and speed were easy to keep track of and combat isn’t slowed down by a huge list of modifiers. The game also includes a lot of interesting scenarios.
I read the rules again on the flight home and I’m looking forward to playing again. I’m going to try it out with friends and then offer it to my middle school students. Again, I’d like to thank Scott, and the other gentleman I spoke with whose name escapes me, for all their help and patience. I think they’ve got a great game on their hands.
George
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