Before I forget, I wanted to mention that I played a game of Bolt Action with my regular gaming club last weekend. Jim Johnson was kind enough to provide the rules and the minis. All I provided was a tape measure and some breakfast tacos!
The scenario was vaguely Market Garden: British Paras held a town across a bridge, awaiting reinforcement down a single road. Germans were deployed in the middle, to defend the road and prevent the British from linking up.
Marder holds the crossroads... but not for long.
In a game of some serious ups and downs, the end result was a German victory. Sadly, the Germans lost three armoured vehicles (a StuG, Puma, and Marder) and a PaK40, but managed to hold off the British armour through sheer grit, determination, a flamethrower and a Panzerschreck. German infantry eliminated the advancing British infantry to a man.
StuG gets hit from behind...
The Paras were virtually untouched, and spent much of the game awaiting a German assault that never came. Why? Because the Germans responsible for the assault had sneakily moved into possession of one end of the bridge, capturing an objective, without contesting the objective on the other end of the bridge. This gave the Germans two of three objectives for a marginal German victory as time ran out.
Paras Await German Onslaught. And Wait... and wait...
A few thoughts on the game:
- It probably works better as a smaller game. We ran it with two players on each side, each player controlling a couple of vehicles, two or three squads of infantry, support weapons, etc.
- I enjoyed it, but you can not play it as if it is Flames of War. The losing team failed to adjust to a different rules set, and this cost them.
- I like that you have to declare what you are doing before you measure. I hate when people move up to just outside of assault range, for example, because they measure the distance to a fraction of an inch to stay safe.
- I like the dice activation system. I also liked the orders dice.
