I've just had a question from Red October1984 in the 'What Are You Doing Now In Real Life' thread about the airplane game, and rather than go into a lengthy explanation with pictures there I figured I'd do it here.
Mustangs & Messerschmitts was created by my late friend Rocky Russo and current friend Doug Larsen. Rocky had played D&D with Gary Gygax himself, so the name was sort of a tribute. M&M is a World War two game, with WW1, '30s, Korea, Arab-Israeli, Vietnam and modern variants. It's a game system designed for people who like to build models. The models are mostly 1/72 scale, and are fitted with a tube in the bottom which mounts to a steel wire attached to a clothespin. The arrangement allows for the model to roll and pitch. The clothespin clamps to a six-foot dowel that slots into a trolley that rolls around the floor. The whole thing allows full freedom of movement in three dimensions. The control sheet has all the information for the plane the player is "flying", including how many rolls of the rear wheel it can make per turn, how many inches it can climb without losing speed, how many inches it can dive, how tight it can turn. Turning is controlled by a steel pin attached to the wheel castor, and is stopped by pins placed in holes equal to the turn radius for that plane.
Gameplay is slow, but relative performance is highly accurate. I've posted the pictures elsewhere, but I can't find them, so here they are again. Lately we've only been playing the WW1 variant, Triplane, so all the pictures are from that era.
