Bolt Action AAR – Point Defence – Soviets vs British 1,000pts

I finally made it down the club for the first time in ages in the New Year, December saw me have plans every single weekend so it was a no-go. I played Jim again at 1,000pts of Bolt Action. I used my tried and tested Soviet list and Jim ran his Brits. We played Point Defence and like normal I was defending (every time we’ve played this mission I’ve played defender and HATE preliminary bombardments!). I used my two Zis-3 guns to defend either corner of the board; the best thing about these is while they’re medium AT guns they can also be utilised as light howitzers so are effective on both armour and infantry. I packed two objectives filled with troops and left my T34, another squad and some of the team weapons to come on in reserve.

Jim’s Sherman entered the battle and immediately took out one of the Zis-3s looking across the board from him. Thankfully though I retaliated with the T34 and managed to immobilise and then destroy the vehicle. Jim had a SAS truck that he had been banging on about all week filled with a huge SAS squad. Unfortunately for him he outflanked onto the road on the left, the truck was blown up and pinned the squad in position and my flamethrower team came on the same edge and burnt the poor Brit specialists into a crisp. 

My Green squad was dug into some rocks on the left hand side and stayed there all game holding the objective.  For a free inexperienced squad they have been my MVP every game I’ve played with them. They’re expendable men who seem to refuse to die no matter how many shots they take, and for inexperienced guys they’re shooting is pretty top notch. For once my dice rolls for everything were coming up trumps; even my mortar was ranging in quickly and wiping squads out left, right and centre.

As Jim was using his force to try and get the two objectives I was defending, I ran my third squad onto the non-defended objective and kept them in cover to hold all three objectives without much threat. By turn 6 we rolled and there would be no turn 7, to be fair I think Jim’s minimal remaining men wouldn’t have made it across the table anyway. Was a well fought match and pleased I picked up the victory. Will have to try a different Soviet list at some point and maybe pick up some different models, really wanting to try the Soviet Engineer Squad with Body armour, can only be killed on a 6+ and veterans with a flamethrower…yes please!

Build Up To Welsh Open - AAR Reports

So the Welsh Open has been and gone and what an amazing event it was! I'm going to be covering the event in another blog post in the next couple of days so this is the build up to the Welsh Open.

As you can tell from the lack of updates, work and life has kept me busy the last month or so but I've had some good time to do some hobby and get the Japanese battle ready for the Welsh Open. I had organised a 1,000pt game with my Tournament list against Jim the week before the event however we only got to Turn 3 before we had to call it due to time.

I also took my Soviets out for a League game against league leader Dom and his Italians, we played Maximum Attrition and while it was very close I came up just short mainly due to his Recce armoured car which seemed to dodge everything in sight. Though the car's shooting was pretty poor failing every turn to take out the Zis-3's crew which was pinning down the left side of the table. I was lucky though because he decided against his flamethrower car which has been the thorn in many people's side.

Thankfully I've only got 3 games left of 500pts which I'll be looking to get done next weekend hopefully, don't get me wrong 500pts is ok for beginners to get into the game but it does limit what you can do and playing on a 4 x 4 table isn't the greatest. Bolt Action is really alot better at larger points and I'm counting down the days until the League hits 750pts and we can use armour. I'm not sure whether to use the Soviets or Japanese for 750pts, I might mix between the two. I was wanting to do a German army at some point but having attempted to assemble the Plastic Late War Germans with all the loose weapons my interest has wained a little bit. I'll probably do them as my next army but I'm going to probably look at doing a fully metal army, maybe using a mix of the Waffen SS Box Set, Fallschirmjager Box Set and some models from Artizan Design. Don't expect anything until Christmas at the earliest!

So yeah some images from the league game and 1,000pt game against Jim. I can't really remember what happened in either as it was so long ago so I'll just get these up and then crack on with the Welsh Open post.

500pts vs. Italians

1,000pts vs Brits

 

AAR - Soviets vs Japanese - Bolt Action

So as mentioned I hosted a training game for Craig at the club as he's just getting into Bolt Action with Japanese. We decided to keep it at 500pts for his first game on a 4 x 4 board and for ease of playing we played Maximum Attrition, it's my least favourite scenario in the Rulebook but when you're just starting out it's easier to just aim to kill the opponent while learning the rules than worrying about objectives and the such.

I ran a 500pt Veteran List, a first for my Soviets and Mort ran a mix of Vets, Regulars and Inexperienced (Heavy Mortar) including a nasty horde of Veteran Japanese Infantry that proved to do any significant damage to. As already mentioned I was easily wiped off the table, Mort used Smoke really well to block my Sniper hiding in a centralised building and then used his Sniper to take him out in one shot.

His Sniper continued to pick off units including my Lieutenant and Medium Mortar. Funnily enough my MVP unit was my free rifle squad who seemed to shrug off any incoming fire and even wiped a squad of Regular infantry too. At the end of the game they were the only Soviets left on the table and seemed to be the only thing that wanted to kill stuff. My two Vet squads both assaulted the large vet squad and failed miserably and were wiped. After that it was down to the teams and the free squad and I knew that I wasn't going to get anywhere with that.

Here's some pics I managed to get, I need to remember to get more pictures in the future of my games;

It Returns!

Back From The Dead....

Fear not I'm alive! It's been almost two months since my last post, apologies for that. Since then I've been to Morocco and back, tore up the back garden and laid turf and fitted a new fence, been to Glastonbury to work for Oxfam for the week, and been working my tits off in my job. Unfortunately with all of that happening I've had to put the blog on the backburner but I'm now back and hopefully it'll be better than ever!

So what have I been up to in the world of wargaming in the past two months? Well the Soviets are fully finished to a 1,000pts on the dot. Me and Jim had a game with his finished Brits a couple of weeks ago and while I took a very early lead by the end of the battle Jim had beaten me by about 2 points mainly by getting his units off the board. I'll get some pictures sorted out in the next week or so, at the moment they’re in a case and with another 1,000pt game on Sunday I don’t want to take them all out to then put them all back in.

Despite having the Welsh Open at the beginning of October I’ve made absolutely no progress on my Japanese, I’ve put the next couple of weeks aside for getting all the squads built and primed, weather permitting. I’m still trying to source a couple of the models as unfortunately Warlord doesn’t seem to have a lot of the artillery and anti-tank guns for sale yet. I’ll be trailing through the other companies of the web to try and source what I need hence why I’m going to focus on the troops first.

I’ve organised an Escalation League for Bolt Action at NAG, we’re going to be starting at 500pts before moving to 750pts and finally 1K. A couple of people haven’t exactly been happy about some of the rules but at the moment we’ve got five people signed up with a couple more showing interest so hopefully it’ll garner so more interest once a few of the games have begun. Full details and rules for the league can be found here.

Outside of Bolt Action, I went to the midnight launch of the 7^th Edition Warhammer 40K. Granted I was coming back from Morocco at the time but why not, I’ve still yet to play a game of 40K due to my recent time constraints but having read the rulebook quite a bit it seems like it’ll be decent once I pick it up and I get playing a bit more.

Warhammer Fantasy-wise I participated in the first tournament of the year a month ago, we had a no-comp 2,000pt competition and I decided to take my Ogres as usual. Two 20-0 losses and one 14-6 win wasn’t really what I had planned but I’ve finally decided to box up and store away the Ogres for the foreseeable future. After a little while they get a little boring and stale. I’ve started the process of clearing out some of my failed armies (Lizardmen will be the first to go, my Empire will either go into storage or be sold too), once I’ve cleared those out I’m going to be starting a Vampire Count army. They were my original choice when I returned to Fantasy last year until I was drawn into the Ogres because let’s be honest what’s cooler than; Vampires, Zombies, Ghouls, Skeletons and everything else that goes bump in the night? I know I’m going to need a big bunch of Zombies (thankfully Mantic Games do pretty well priced undead) and the thought of painting every one is a little daunting but I’m hoping the Army Painter Necrotic Flesh Spray will give me a decent basecoat to then give the skin a wash and colour the clothing. It’ll be a long project for sure to get done but I have a feeling the army is going to look pretty cool once they’re finished.

Gorgeous Models

A couple of weeks back I had my first training game for Infinity. Mike, one of the main advocates of Infinity at the club is now a Warcor who can teach players the rules. I used his beautifully painted Ariadna against his Toahaa army and loved the game. The small model count really helps the game flow especially with the reactive orders meaning that no player is ever sat twiddling their thumbs because everyone is always involved. Check out Mike’s great blog here for all things Infinity. I’ve bought the Morat Sectorial Starter Force and the Vanguard Infantry box, they’re two of the newest box sets to be launched and they’re beautiful sculpts. I’ve already got the Starter Force based and grey-primed with the Vanguard waiting in the wings for a spray. Once I get these all started I’ll be having another training game to learn some more of the advance rules of the game and I really cannot wait for whenever that will be.

Finally I’ve signed up for a Judge Dredd Campaign at the club! The models and rulebook is produced by Warlord in conjunction with Mongoose Publishing. I’ve started a Cursed Earth Desperadoes gang but I’m still working out what equipment to give to each person in the gang for the campaign. I originally had an idea of two heroes and multiple goons but after kitting out two heroes with all the bells and whistles it really limited my choice for how many men I could run. We’re kicking off the Campaign August 10^th so hopefully by then I’ll have a couple of games under my belt and the initial guys for my gang all painted and sorted.

So yeah it’s been an eventful couple of months, hopefully now I can settle down and focus on getting the Japanese in some sort of recognisable state and make a move on with everything else. More updates later this week once I have Banzai’d straight into my Japanese models.
Chalmers