GUWS Takes Wing with IADS: The Game!

🪿 Georgetown University Wargaming Society (GUWS) Plays IADS: The Game

Ric and I have become regulars at the GUWS (pronounced like the bird, goose) board game sessions, and we’ve had such a fun time at each meet up! GUWS players are always welcoming to everyone.

First time meeting Sam, Sam, their Mobile SAMs, and the GUWS gamers back in September 2025!

We enjoy hearing fresh, novel observations about our game, and the Georgetown students never disappoint. During one of our first times attending a GUWS event, Brad commented on how the two-player draft forces your team to consider defense and offense equally, which is different from other wargames that tend to focus on one or the other at a time.

🎯 The Sam & Sam Duo

The Sam & Sam duo team used some very sneaky concealment of their strike packages, only moving their two 2-card formations half a card diameter forward for a full turn. This clever ploy misled the opposing team into assuming they had two Upgraded Mobile SAMs rather than four airplanes!

When the opposing team used their Intelligence card’s Order of Battle capability, the Sams’ cards were all revealed. The comical shock and surprise of seeing several High-Speed Bombers coming straight at them caused the opposing team to completely redirect their forces!

🔧 GUWS Inspires a New Mechanic

The Sams posed an insightful question to Ric the first time they played IADS: The Game, which led Ric to create a new mechanic featured in our recent commercial print of the Advanced Capabilities Expansion Set: Low Observable Mission Planning.

Originally, Ric had already considered this tactical concept as an unclassified House Rule addition, but the Sams' inquiry was exactly the catalyst needed for Ric to solidify this gameplay mechanic into IADS canon.

"Low Observable Mission Planning" is a new advanced capability in which you may choose for adv. unit cards to deploy to the HQ during the Deploy Phase. During the Combat Phase, on an Action 1, they appear anywhere in the battlespace undetected. This move takes two Actions to resolve.

In fact! At another board game convention recently -- the Congress of Gamers Winter Session last weekend in Rockville, MD -- my teammate and I successfully employed Low Observable Mission Planning of our Adv. Air Superiority Fighter and its Collaborative RPA to take out the opposing HQ and AWACS simultaneously!

I’m anxious to implement this newly canonized capability again tomorrow at Your Hobby Place in Alexandria during their Winter Bash! The Sams' excellent intuition for wargaming is soaring across several VULs. 🪽Hype!

🎲 Join GUWS!

The club meets every two weeks or so, usually in the Healy Student Center. You can keep updated via their newsletter by becoming a member.

We recommend joining the GUWS club to all airplane nerds. We’re working with Sam to set up a dedicated GUWS session featuring IADS: The Game this spring! Stay tuned for more details.

See you all soon at Georgetown!

-- Madonna