Bolt Action at EWG

Last night at the club, Dave brought out a previously played scenario to give Bolt Action a try.

Whereas Fireball Forward is Opportunity Fire Heavy, not so with Bolt Action, where its more about the number of dice.

Bruce & I played the Soviets and started with 2 Rifle Squads, an Infantry Gun & an AT-Rifle team. The building was the ultimate objective, so we placed one squad in there to make the Germans fight for every brick. As seen in the image above, we are past the initial turn, where out Infantry gun was lost after brewing up a Panzer III. We had also lost our AT-Rifle team under hails of MG fire from the halftracks.

Add to the fact that whenever we did get a shot off with one of our vehicles in was invariably a blank (lots of rolls of 1 for damage. The sheer number of dice for the Germans allowed them to hammer anything we brought out.

Although wiped out to just a single Armoured Car, they Germans nearly threw the game with their cautious advance, as they had to get infantry into the building to capture it. This they squeaked out on the very last turn, having had the first dice.

One of the voiced downsides of Bolt Action, is that it is based on tournament play, using points for everything which of course is historically inaccurate. Due to the dice used though it quickly punishes a force with less, making scenario's which in many other rule sets work quite well leave one wanting. There was a lot of positive feedback on the smoothness of the system in general however & everyone seemed to like the dice system for determining actions.

One thing against us was that when the players saw that all of our units had used their dice, they were more brazen, performing actions which one would likely not see in normal games. This allows gamey players to wait their opponents out, just sitting and shooting until the dice are exhausted then rushing forward not fearing point blank fire.

Perhaps placing an odd dice in the bag for an end of turn similar to the Lardie's systems, which would then allow units with Ambush able to get final shots before the next turn, however anyone not having received a die misses out. Sure this could backfire, but it may be worth some investigation. (just my thoughts)

I do expect we will see this played again. Thanks Dave for bringing it out to the club.