I’ll start off with the fact that my hobby plans for the past two months have been fairly derailed. Two bouts of illness in the household along with some other busy spring activities took a toll on my output. Such is life. However, I am now essentially ready to begin the campaign.

The campaign has included a lot of (self-inflicted) preparations. In this article we’ll briefly walk through those different items and what I did to prepare them. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re wondering what campaign I’m rambling on about, you can check out the previous article covering the setting here.

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The Rules

I’ve had the PDF of Bag The Hun and Squadron Forward for some time, however I tend to prefer paper in hand. I had the Bag The Hun book printed, and I printed Squadron Forward myself. I decided to get the rulebook professionally printed as I wanted the nice spiral binding and cover pages, along with nicer paper. It came in mid-April and I’m happy with the quality. Squadron Forward got printed and added to a Bag The Hun three ring binder.

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Mini Bases

Bag The Hun plays on a hex grid, which meant that I needed some hex base flying stands. For these I turned to my favorite base supplier, Litko. I decided to start with 1.5″ clear, hexagon, flight stands. They required some minor assembly and I also bought some clever little dice holders to hold an altitude die on each base for gameplay. I had a little fitment issue between the flight stand pegs and the Hawk Widgets I affix to all my aircraft for ease swapping. Both claimed to be 3mm but upon some inspection the Litko pegs are listed as 1/8″ / 3mm. Yet when one does the math its actually about 3.2mmd which means the pegs are too large for the widgets. So I ended up having to reduce the upper ends of the flight stand pegs to get the widgets on there. It was not a deal breaker but it was a minor annoyance and I’ll be exploring further options for basing the in the future.

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Activation Deck

Bag The Hun uses a deck of cards for activation of units in game. Though the Lardies provide some for free to print at home, I wanted a nice durable and universal set for myself. I hopped on Inkscape and devised a simple card layout, made all the cards needed for now, then sent them off to Board Game Maker to have a custom deck of actual cards printed. I’m very happy with the results.

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Game Aids

I printed some very well done quick reference sheets to help me out. However the real meat of game aid prep are the airplane and pilot cards. Using Inkscape I created card templates for both pilots and aircraft. For pilots these are 3.5″x 2.5″ reference cards which mostly contain the info from their Squadron Forward characters (covered in a previous article here). For aircraft these cards are meant to provide a single stop for me to see all the stats and special rules, as well as tracking damage and ammunition. All this info forced me to make the cards larger than I had planned but I’m happy with the result.

I shared these cards on the Bag The Hun Facebook group and notably Storm of Steel Wargaming took the format and ran with it. He’s completed most of the planes for both Malaya and the Battle of Britain. I’ve done most of the planes for both the US and Japanese navies in the Pacific at this point. All of these cards are available either from a link courtesy of Storm of Steel or right here on Iron Dice for the ones I have created.

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Play Surface

I have a blue fleece sheet big enough for my 4×8, along with the Tablewar GeoMat hex overlay. It’s okay but I find the GeoMat quite glossy. I think it would do better with an actual game mat under it instead of a solid dark blue background.

At Adepticon I wandered into a booth for Mats by Mars. I was impressed with their vinyl mats, and was informed they could accommodate a 4×8 mat in their ocean print with a 1.5″ hex grid on it. I chewed on this for a while after Adepticon and finally ordered one a few weeks back. As of this writing it is yet to arrive, but I look forward to it when it does.

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The Models

This is certainly the last but not least of the prep. I broke this project up into two segments. First I painted the US planes, then I followed up with the Japanese planes. Since the campaign is kicking off instantly in the action of Midway, I wanted to have the main planes involved available. Eventually I’d like to expand this collection to include some of the land based planes which operated during the battle. For now, with the campaign focus on our intrepid Naval Aviators, I opted to focus on the carrier planes of both sides. I painted all of these planes using mostly the AK Gen3 paints, which I am happy with. Decals came from FlightDeckDecals. The planes themselves are all 3D printed on my Saturn 2, and the files came from the excellent Plane Printer Patreon.

For the US forces I opted for a generic paint scheme appropriate for the time.

-8x Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat fighters for the campaign characters

-6x Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers

-6x Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers

-6x Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers

For the Japanese forces I decided to do actual markings for a specific carrier. For this I chose the Akagi because those decals were available at the time of my order from Flight Deck Decals. I wasn’t overly picky, though I preferred one of the markings with a single fuselage stripe.

9x Mitsubishi A6M2 Reisen “Zero” fighters

6x Aichi D3A1 “Val” dive bombers

6x Nakajima B5N2 “Kate” torpedo bombers

2x Aichi E13A “Jake” reconnaissance float planes (these are done in no particular scheme other than some I saw in some photos and liked)

For both forces I chose the number of fighters based on how many fighters were in typical flights. For bombers I chose six of each type to start as I want to keep the action a little more focused on the fighters and the characters. Additionally, I don’t want to overload myself with planes to use in a solo game. Several of the types will get further planes painted and added to the collection as the campaign moves on to later points in the war as historically many paint scheme changes occurred over time.

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So alright it wasn’t so brief after all. I went overboard on prep for this but I’m very excited to see it all come together for the games ahead. Check in again soon for the first after action report of the campaign, I’ve played it already but I’m still working on the battle report for it.