My First Game of BOLT ACTION WW2 Miniatures Wargaming

Over two years ago (wow!) I picked up the BOLT ACTION core rules book, several Army Books, and a small force of British Commandos (naturally - new readers, look to the left of this article...). I reviewed the game in the abstract over on the Post Modern Pulp Blog, but I figured an actual game report was best suited to this blog (I'll put a "Hey, take a look" post up over on PMP pointing back here as well).

This past Friday, my friend and fellow author Dan Eldredge and I got together to play out a game of Bolt Action for the first time. Neither of us has had the time to fully paint our armies, and we agreed to not do a full battle report (the shame of a formal bat-rep containing unpainted miniatures would be too much for Dan to bear...), but we had the day to get together and enough miniatures to fight a good-sized battle, so we brought together everything that was assembled and decided to just have a go at it and try out as many of the units and rules as possible.

In short, I fielded a mixed force of British Army and Commando forces, with a bunch of weapons teams, a Daimler armored car, and a Sherman tank. Dan fielded a platoon of Panzergrenadiers in half-tracks, along with several weapon teams, a squad of veteran late-war grenadiers carrying StG 44 assault rifles, and a Tiger tank (yikes!). We played an "Envelopment" scenario, where the attacker (Germans) tries to break through the defender's (British) lines. This seemed well suited to our units, since none of my infantry had transports and I had a ton of weapons teams (mortars, AT rifle, Vickers machine gun, etc.), while Dan had mechanized infantry and a powerful tank. 

British on the near side of the board, Germans on the far side

One immediate difference we noticed between Bolt Action and Warhammer 40K (which we've both played a lot over the years) was the effects of pinning and morale. The more a unit takes fire from enemies, the more they are "pinned", and a pinned unit has to take a morale test in order to do...well...almost anything. A unit can get pinned into utter uselessness without taking a single casualty, a situation in stark comparison to 40K, where many armies have very high morale and many units are Fearless or Stubborn or otherwise ignore various morale situations. The mission began with a bombardment of my lines, and although I only suffered one casualty, many of my units suffered pinning and a couple even broke and ran! This caused me quite a bit of trouble early on, as a number of my units couldn't get into the fight for the first couple of turns (thankfully I had a lot of units, so I wasn't completely hampered in this regard).

Dan's Panzergrenadiers made a bold thrust into the center of my lines, determined to punch through my regular infantry and split my forces. My poor infantry section stood their ground for a short while, before weight of fire from several squads of Germans, as well as their support weapons, caused the unit to suffer too many casualties and eventually break and get wiped out. In Bolt Action, if you lose half a unit's models in a turn, and they fail a morale test, the unit is destroyed. This definitely keeps the tempo of a battle going and prevents tiny remnant units running around ineffectually.

The Poor Bloody Infantry, about a turn away from being wiped from the board. Note the Tiger in the distance...

Once Dan's infantry had punched a hole in my lines, he also managed to immobilize my Sherman with a single shot from his Tiger. I quickly found myself staring into a lot of enemy gun barrels, and decided some audaciousness was in order. So, I turned to my Commandos and sent them into the teeth of the enemy, bayonets and daggers gleaming, Sten guns blazing away. In Bolt Action, an assault is dangerous - the enemy gets to react by firing on the charging unit if they start far enough away - but there is no draw, just victory or death for the attacker. Thankfully for me, Commandos are "Tough Fighters" and excel at the assault, and so I wiped out one of Dan's squads in a flurry of bullets, blades, and bayonets.

An empty shell crater is all that's left of the Panzergrenadier squad, while their mates to the right look away in horror...

At this point, Dan's officer jumps into the half-track and opens fire on my Commandos with its machine gun, and the other infantry squad also opens fire, as does the advancing Tiger tank. Seeing my center forced open yet again, my Forward Artillery Officer calls down a barrage of artillery fire on the German squad (see the white die with the bulls-eye in the photo above). Unfortunately, the blast radius of the barrage is HUGE, and over the next two rounds, a number of units - both friend and foe - are pinned or damaged, and my poor medic and his stretcher-bearer (the bare metal models in the top-right of the above photo) are killed by a heavy howitzer shell!

Determined to press on, Dan drives his Tiger tank through the bombardment zone and tries to get off of my size of the board, since his infantry are so pinned by the bombardment that they're refusing to embark on their transport. With my Sherman immobilized and out of line-of-sight, and my armored car on the other side of the board (he's been sniping at a German MMG unit and the veteran Grenadiers all game), all I've got to deal with the tiger is my lone PIAT anti-tank gunner, who lost his loader and broke and ran in the opening bombardment. He's finally collected himself and lost his pinning penalties, and he moves forward, finally getting within good range for a shot at the Tiger's flank.

Steady hands now, lad! Make it count!

He misses with his first shot due to moving and firing and long range, but the second shot hits. I roll a "5" for damage, enough to cause a penetrating hit, and I get another "5" on the damage table, knocking out the Tiger. With only one infantry squad left, Dan makes a roll to see if the heavily-pinned unit will board its Hanomag half-track, and it fails. At this point, Dan concedes defeat, since he really can't get anyone off my side of the board in the next turn (this was the end of turn 5).

Overall, we both had a lot of fun. The rules move fast once you get the hang of them, and while the game isn't exactingly realistic, there are enough elements that make sense to give it a feeling of completeness and logic. The effects of pinning especially can be very frustrating, but it makes sense that your men aren't just blithely going about their business as shells explode and bullets snap all around them. You also need to make sure you're using your officers' Morale bonuses to their best effect, something I think neither of us paid much attention to during the game.

I'm not sure when we'll have another chance to play, but we're both looking forward to another battle, this time with the game mechanics more firmly understood and a better idea of how the game itself plays out. When we do, I'll be sure to post another report.

Until next time, Cheers!

Tankards and Broadswords Awakens!

So...yeah! It's been a couple of years since I posted, but I'm resurrecting this blog because of a number of developments in the Fantasy / Gaming front going on over here. Many thanks to those of you who've kept me in your feed - comments here are always welcome!

In January of last year, I published a Swords & Sorcery novella, Spiders and Flies. It was largely written back in 2001 as an homage to pulpy S&S fantasy fiction a la Robert E. Howard and the like, set in a world I had created as a campaign setting for my SCORE homebrew RPG system. So far, sales have been slow, but I get a nibble now and then, and reviews have been overall very positive, which is quite nice.

The story follows four adventurers as they trek into a nearby desert wasteland in order to plunder the abandoned temple of a mostly-forgotten spider god. As you might guess, things don't go as smoothly as the treasure-hunters anticipated! There's a lot of adventure and bloody violence, and it is a short, quick read of about 20,000 words, enough to entertain you for about a hour's reading pleasure. It is available on Amazon as either an ebook or a paperback.

My friend and fellow author Dan Eldredge has published his second novel, The Grand Masquerade. This is the sequel to his debut work, The Pirates of Alnari, which I posted about two years ago.

If you like brutal, very realistic high-medieval combat, diabolical political intrigue, massive land and sea battles, and plenty of adventure, these books are a must-read. If you combined the coolest aspects of the Game of Thrones books and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels, you'd get this series.

The Grand Masquerade (as well as The Pirates of Alnari) is available in ebook and paperback formats from Amazon. Click on the cover photo to go to the book's Amazon page.

In addition, I've put out two more COMMANDO novels since this blog was active - Operation Cannibal and Operation Dervish. Both are available on Amazon in ebook and paperback formats, and you can find them by clicking on the links provided to the left of this post. There's also my Western novella, Renegade's Revenge, and my '70s era men's adventure novel, San Francisco Slaughter. Both of these are also available on Amazon in ebook and print versions.

Beyond my writing, I've started gaming again. I'm running a 5th Edition Dungeon's & Dragons campaign, and I'm playing in a 4th Edition campaign. All I have to say is, WOW - the differences are enough to give you mental whiplash! More on this to come in more followup posts.

Commando RPG Update

Between a new graduate class and working towards acquiring a new job, I haven't been able to get much accomplished in terms of RPG work over the last two weeks. I will provide some updates, though:

- I've been watching World War II movies like a madman. The Operations Manual is going to have a pretty extensive section on resource materials, and one of these is going to be a rather sizable filmography. I'm not going to focus on every single WW2 movie ever made; for the purposes of the core RPG, I'm focusing primarily on movies that take place in and around the European / North African theater, and involving mostly small unit, commando, or espionage actions. If / when I do supplements, I'll develop a separate section of reference materials for those.

- I've always thought of them mostly as "Books to get your Napoleonic Soldiers in the right uniform color schemes", but the Osprey military series of books have been an invaluable resource. I've been buying them just about as fast as I can read them right now. Also, apparently they are releasing a new series of books on individual weapons that had a great impact on military history - very cool.

- I recently downloaded and skimmed through the WW2 RPG "Behind Enemy Lines". I downloaded my PDF through DriveThruRPG, and it's a Mystique Enterprises reprint of a 1982 FASA RPG. Wow. At some point I'll have to write a more comprehensive review of this game, but it is a perfect example of those early 80's, high-realism, rule-for-everything, extremely over-engineered RPGs. I think it's a well-made RPG, but hopelessly complicated in terms of what I'd want to play. Still, contains a lot of good information.

- Although I only purchased and played through it once this summer, I went back and replayed most of Call of Duty 2 a week or so ago. It was good to play it again after doing so much work on Commando, because I could eye the game from the perspective of "How does this video game relate to what I'm creating"? As an example, take rifles. You've got the British Lee-Enfield, the Kar 98K, and the Springfield 1903 - all bolt action rifles of relatively similar size, caliber, and operation. If a soldier of any of the three main armies picked up any of these, within a few minutes he could fight with it without much confusion at all.

In a game as "big-grained" as mine is, the tiny little nuances that differentiated these three weapons from each other are pretty much meaningless. A full-powered bolt-action military rifle is pretty much going to do the same thing the same way as any other full-powered bolt-action military rifle. Much the same will go to the many various pistols and submachine guns that will be available; some will have slightly different stats one way or the other, but none of these weapons will be particularly ground breaking; the idea is that they are different because one is a German MP-40 and the other is a British Sten MK II, not because of some difference in damage ratings or combat ranges. Ultimately, this means that the sorts of weapons a character picks are based less on "which submachine gun does the most damage" but rather "which is the coolest / fits my character best".

- I have debated long and hard over just how to "package" this game. I will probably release it as a PDF, since that's simple and easy to do. The major debate in my mind is whether or not to design the PDF for printing or for use on a computer screen. And, if for printing, should it be 8.5" x 11", or done as a book fold? Questions questions. I'm thinking the initial release might be done as a computer-formatted PDF, complete with (at least some) internal and external hyperlinks. At the very least, it could be printed out in an awkward manner. And yes, I will avoid using Courier New as the body font. Instead, I'll probably use a neat typewriter font (like the teaser poster uses) for titles and headers and the like, and do the rest in some other more readable font.

What do people think? For the initial release (the "1.0" version), should it just be a computer-friendly PDF, a print-friendly PDF, or something else entirely? I did have an idea at one point to make a pure "Notepad-formatted" .txt file just for the fun of it (courier new whether you like it or not), but that might get me thrown out of the party...

My New RPG Project

Many apologies for being absent from here for over a month. Work has been busy (training a new co-worker), and I've been working on doing some fiction writing over the last few weeks, as well as plunging headlong into a whole mess of Netflix rentals and going back to watch a few DVDs from off my shelves.

I've also been working on a new RPG project over the last couple of weeks. It sort of grew out of my current writing project, but it's really been in the back of my mind since I passed over my draft of the T&B RPG to Rob Lang at the Free RPG Blog. Rob's biggest criticism of the game was that, when all was said and done, there was very little to make it interesting or special, nothing to set it apart from all the dozens, nay hundreds, of "medium crunch generic fantasy / general purpose role-playing games".

I had to agree with Rob, and have been spending a lot of time pondering a suitable vehicle for the rules, ideas simmering on the back-burner of my creative stovetop. Something that hasn't been seen a lot, something that'd be fun to play, use some interesting rules, but not over-burden or over-complicate matters.

I think I've finally found that game.


More to come...