Bolt Action AAR: Red Devils vs. German Heer & Italian Bersaglieri

Had another Bolt Action game last week with my Red Devils, this time in a slightly more Italian themed battle with my guys facing a force consisting of Italian Bersaglieri and German Heer troops with some armor support in the form of a Hetzer. We played the first scenario from the rulebook with the attacker attempting to have units on the enemy deployment zone by the end of the game.

We used slightly more terrain than what we'd previously used and it did allow for some more manouvering with safe lanes being plentiful. Deployment started with the defending team placing all of the Italians covering the center of the table and all the German troops offboard ready to move in as reserves wherever I concentrated my forces.

In my first turn I decided to bring in nearly all of my forces on my right flank which had more heavy cover. On my left flank I only left some harassment units in the form of a Recon Jeep, a sniper team and my FOO team.

In the beginning of turn three I managed to get a massively lucky artillery barrage straight in the middle of the Italian position covering all the troops and also some of the reinforcing Germans. If that wasn't enough luck I managed to roll 6s on both of the Bersaglieri rifle squads wiping the other out and leaving the other one with only two men left standing. All the other units received a healthy amount of pinning which basically left the left flank without any protection as most of the German units had come to counter my forces on the right flank. 

Taking advantage of the situation my recon jeep zipped forward to gun the Bersaglieri MG team down and threaten their flank.

Meanwhile the German Hetzer parked itself in ambush position preventing one of my squads and a jeep from moving up the valley.

With their other flank completely unprotected I started moving my units through the central woods and my left flank blasting anything that came in the way. At this point it was already pretty obvious that nothing could stop the British tide as I could easily focus all my firepower on one unit at a time obliterating anything in the way. I did loose a flame thrower and a PIAT team to some defensive fire though as I moved them up quite boldly in the face of fire.

We finished the game on turn three with only a German HQ team and the Hetzer left standing while I had only lost the two small teams and a handful of riflemen that had gotten hit by an Italian mortar round. Thanks to some pretty darn lucky dice rolls the game really went my way from the start. Without the two Bersaglieri rifle teams disappearing after an artillery strike the things could have gone very differently.

 

The ever watchful Umpire kept close watch on the conduct of all players from his wooden and canvas throne.

 

Painting progress and games

Life on the wargaming front has been slightly quiet in the last few weeks with real life getting in the way in the form of work and the starting of this years hunting season. Not much painting going on and I only managed to get in one Bolt Action game in the last few weeks.

I did manage to finish up my 105mm Artillery Battery for Flames of War. The staff teams still need maps on the tables, but that will have to wait until I find some good decals as I'm not going to try to lose my sanity trying to paint a tiny map of Normandy :)

I also got a game of Bolt Action in this week with a 2 vs. 2 game pitting my Red Devils with regular British infantry versus German Fallschirmjäger and Heer. Close game that we ended up calling a tie in the end. We had a pretty good showing of players with 7 guys alltogether playing Bolt Action. It's slowly starting to gain popularity with the people and many have bought figures to start playing.

At the moment my painting queue is embarrassingly long with countless projects that have progressed forwards a bit. It seems really hard to find enough motivation to get through something. Today I picked up a resin viking age church from Gripping Beast and quickly painted it up. It still needs paint on the doors, but otherwise it's done. Two base colours and a few drybrush layers was nice to do for a change and actually getting something done fast should hopefully get my motivation up again :)

I also decided to do a practice model with my newish Harder & Steenbeck airbrush. I'd bought up a 40k starter set Hellbrute a while back just for that and decided to put it together and paint it as a Khorne follower using the airbrush as much as I can. The armour and skin are now all done and I need to paint up details with a brush before I can fade them together with the airbrush in the end. The face area looks a bit funky as I needed to prepaint the face and the teeth surrounding it and then cover it with bluetac to protect it from paint. Those dark contrasts shouldn't be visible in the end as there is a piece coming on top of all that which leaves just the face visible.

Hobby progress and conventions for autumn!

Now that I've more or less survived a friends stag party and recovery is well on it's way it was time to get back into hobby stuff again. Hard to get a good flow going when you are interrupted every few days and can't really focus on a project from start to finish :) But still the "last" unit for my 101st army is gathering paint and is really only needing highlights on their jackets, skin and the guns and then I'm done. I still have a few sniper stands, half a platoon and an MG platoon left, but I never really seem to run them in a game so I guess they'll have to wait as I really need to start working on the Waterloo project again. Roughly 16 battalions and a handful of squadrons to paint up still.

But more importantly I managed to book flights to Belgium to go and visit Crisis in the beginning of November! I was looking for a longish weekend getaway with the missus for the autumn when I remembered that Crisis was held during that time frame. After some excellent argumentation on behalf of tiny lead men and some vague promises related to the diamond district, Antwerp was settled upon. Judging from the pictures I've seen on the blogs over the years it should be a very nice weekend. Though I have a feeling that the 23kilo weight limit on air travel might prove to be slightly too little :) At least now there is something to wait for as the Finnish Summer is turning from a record heat wave into the regular rainy affair that it normally is.