Bolt Action: Hold Until Relieved

I'm back from the last grouse hunt of the year and back to blogging and other wargames related things.

I played another game of Bolt Action with the Red Devils again, this time against Fallschirmjägers in a more urban setting. I was set up for defence, which really suited me well as I could get in good positions and let the Germans advance within the range of my SMGs.

Red Devils:
HQ
FOO
Sniper
MMG
Flamethrower
3 Full squads.

Fallschirmjäger:
HQ
Sniper
MMG
Panzerschreck
3 Full squads
Kubelwagen
Opel Blitz
Sdkfz 251

The crossroads next to the church were chosen as the objective area. I set up one squad of paras in a house across from the objective and the sniper team in the church tower.

 I brought in my reinforcements from both flanks to stop the Germans from moving in from the sides.

 One German squad moved in towards the objective mounted in the Opel Blitz only to be gunned down by the British MMG that had moved up towards the objective. With their truck destroyed the squad dismounted across the road.

 Meanwhile the sniper in the church tower had managed to pin down the single footgoing German squad on the right flank. They failed their command rolls for a few turns in a row which effectively left them out of the fight. The FOO distinguished himself by managing to order an artillery strike on top of the squad on the right flank. Luckily they escaped mostly without a scratch and only took a pin marker. However they did throw a FUBAR roll on the next turn retreating out of the building.

 With time running out the Germans made a bold move towards the objective with the 251. Not wanting to wait for the British Flamethrower to open up on them a squad of Fallschirmjägers dismounted only to be fired upon by one Para squad and a MMG which took out most of the squad.

 The two transported units hunkered down in the ruins next to the objective.

 In the end I held the objective with two squads well dug in around the objective and the far left squad being well pinned down after multiple turns of firing. However the British casualties were light with only the sniper and flamethrower teams losing men and couple of riflemen going down from the leftmost squad. The Germans ended up losing both their transports and two squads.

Oldhammer acquisitions. There be dragons!

Well I'm getting back into a good hobby flow with some painting being done during this week which has seen 12 more British Napoleonics getting quite a bit of paint on as well as some 15mm Prussians, which are now only waiting for basing. I've also managed to get rid of my old 40k Tau project that has been gathering dust for a few years already.

But more importantly I've finally managed to acquire something that I've wanted for quite some time already! Behold Nick Bibby's Great Spined Dragon! Out of all old citadel dragons this is just somehow the most striking. Especially the facial features are amazingly 'realistic' and extremely menacing. I found this one from the main Finnish wargaming forum for 35 euros which I consider quite a good deal. It's not 100% original  though as the wings are the plastic Balrog wings from the LOTR range, but they look good and are actually quite close to the originals.

All didn't go as planned though as one of the wings broke when I brought it home and the grocery bags rolled on top of the bag where I had the dragon. Bit of a shame, but then again I'm a bit skeptical it would have lasted paint removal either and now I can at least fine tune the wing positions before painting. Now he is off to a bath of Fairy Power Spray and then some pinning and green stuff to fix the wings again.

Long time no see

It's been awfully quiet here on my blog for quite a while with nearly a month long pause between the posts. Real life is really interfering badly with blogging as practically all weekends are spent hunting, which cuts out most of my hobby time.

I haven't really picked up the brushes for nearly a month with only a bit of paint applied on some 15mm minis at home and my only really active painting being done during a club day where we painted a 1000pt German starter set for Bolt Action to be used freely by members.

It hasn't been completely quiet on the wargames front though as I've managed to get in about a game per week though and I've been trying to follow other peoples blogs and forums. Still about a month to go on the busiest hunting season so maybe I'll get my painting mojo back on after that. In the mean time finding energy for concentrating on painting seems to be nigh impossible with most evenings spent lying on the couch watching ice hockey or then playing some game. I have some projects set up though that I'm hoping to get started on when I can gather the motivation.

  Chuck will really be needed to kick me back into business.

Games wise I've played a few games of Bolt Action with varying degrees of success. I'm really growing to like this system more and more. There are of course some issues with it, but all in all in my opinion it does give quite a nice "realistic" outcome most of the time. Real life tactics work quite well and it's simple enough to allow for a fast game.

We also played a demo game of Longstreet a week ago. Seems like a great game and I really like the way the cards are used to influence both your and your enemies play. For small games with a handful of Regiments per side it seems like a great system, but I guess it won't scale that well upwards. I'll definately be trying to play more of this so that my 6mm ACW guys see some action too.

Project wise my Bolt Action collections will be expanded a bit as I bought roughly a 1000pt force of Germans to have an axis army to play with too as most of the players at my club only have Allies. These have been put together whenever I've had the energy. 30 plastic Pioneers and their vehicles etc was surprisingly tedious to do with all the fiddly bits. However no they are all put together and based and are just waiting for a basecoat. Maybe finding motivation for painting these will be a bit easier as I can at least see them being used in the near future quite often unlike some of the other projects. Then there's still most of the Baker Company Winter War stuff. I've only received the basic units until now so still loads to come. I did decide to sell the Russians though as I'm totally fed up with the quality. The Finns I'll finnish as I've already started on them.

Waterloo 2015 is drawing ever closer and I need to paint up 6 French battalions and 6 British and Hannoverian battalions and roughly 3-4 squadrons for both sides. This should keep me quite busy for a while, though I did decide to make my life a bit easier by deciding to revert to 4 models per base instead of the 6 I'd been using. Cutting down 50% of the paint load on the Frenchies and Hannoverians really should speed up the process. 16 guys instead of 24 per battalion is quite merciful.

15mm will also be featured quite heavily during the rest of the year as Early War is going to be the thing in Flames of War for a while. I took advantage of the Battlefront EW sale and bought up units for a Early War german Panzerschützen army. I've always found the early war germans most interesting and now that ETC will be an EW event and a lot of club members focusing on that I decided to jump in the bandwagon. Hopefully a rather quick project as I have quite a bit of armor and all of the vehicles and equipment are quite simple to paint as well.

Some more long term projects are expanding my 15mm US troops with a couple of platoons to allow me to run my collection as Tank destroyer or armored rifle companies. Not too much to add, but I'm not in too much of a hurry with these if everybody will be concentrating on Early War anyways.

Another longer project will be to finally build up my 15mm Prussian army. Most of the Napoleonic games at my club are played with 15mm so getting these guys ready for battle would allow me to take part without having to borrow other peoples minis. The horrendous Warrior minis ones I've had have really kept me from going forward with this too fast as they are all one pose and really bad castings. Now I bought a few test packs from Campaign Game Miniatures and Fantassin and these are from a wholly different planet quality wise. I've yet to test paint them, but hopefully I'll get these done a lot quicker as they seem like something that would actually be nice to paint rather than the tedious task that it is with the Warrior ones.

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.