Celebratory Christmas Game - Bolt Action

Seeing as it's the season of goodwill (festive cheer and all that) Ash and I decided to get together for a day of Hollywood style WW2 gaming a la Bolt Action and then a cinema visit to see some little known indie pic about spaceships and laser swords!

Anyway seeing as we were playing Bolt Action I provided all the models and scenery from my collection as Ash hasn't quite built up his collection yet. We agreed on pretty equal forces and then rolled off to see which side we'd both play, I ended up with Tommies and Ash his beloved Hun (he got to use a Stug so he was happy). This game was the first outing for my Sarissa Gas Lamp Alley buildings which unfortunately I haven't managed to get any paint on yet. Anyway we used a nice narrow board so settled on a mission that involved me having to break through Ash's lines (envelopment) and laid out the terrain accordingly.

Board layout looking south - Thats my entry point at the end
 of the road

The deployment for this game involves the attacker (me) moving at least half his force on the board as the dice are drawn with the remainder as reserves. However with the size of the board I chose to have everyone match on in the first turn. Meanwhile the defender (Ash) has leave half his force off in reserve so had quite limited options for a couple of turns. So my tactic was to mob him and give him too many targets to actually do enough damage to stop me. Ash had deployed a mortar, sniper, mmg and rifle section on board against my 3 sections, para section, mmg, mortar and artillery obs so I should be able to cause some damage before his remaining section, hq and Stug arrive.

Not a bad position for a sniper!

The mortar prepares to lob shells over the church!

The mmg gets snuggled in ready to rake any infantry coming up that road.

So how did it work out I hear you all ask. Well I started out with a preliminary bombardment before the game started however I told the ever fateful 1 and they must have picked the wrong grid on the map because those dastardly Huns were decidedly unscathed as I marched down the road in the first turn.

Everyone's on the board and legging it up the road

"Jenkins, get a move on"

"Err, Sarge, ain't that Jerry up the road with a ruddy
great machine gun?"

I lobbed some smoke with my mortar whilst Ash fired at the pigeons with his sniper rather than at the troops closing in on his position.

I'd almost made it to the centre line ready to launch my assault with my eager troops when Ash managed to lob a mortar round into one of my sections. Some splendid dice rolling later and a little supporting fire from a German rifle section and I was down 2 sections.

Then the bloody Stug arrived however Ash couldn't decide what to do with it so it loitered near the warehouse with a case of the "where do I go"s

I then threw caution to the wind and went in Thompson and Lee Enfields blazing and managed to give some of those Huns a thoroughly good kicking. In the end it was a victory for me, 7 vp's to 4. However it was only because I'd managed to get into Ash's deployment zone by a couple of inches!

Another fun intro to Bolt Action for Ash, it was nice to play it again properly as it's been about 18 months since I rolled dice on anger. Ash has got himself some Yanks and Germans so we can have a few more games hopefully and maybe start a campaign of some kind.

Anyway after we'd packed everything up we traveled to a galaxy far far away and both became kids again. However that may become the subject of another post, or we might just play loads more X-wing and buy a millennium falcon!