Ston Bridge

This Thursday our club did a couple of Market Garden games, since the date was about right for the 79th anniversary. One was a big Flames of War game, that I failed to photograph, whilst the other was a Bolt Action game covering the US attack on Ston Bridge. I played that one because Bolt Action is the lesser of two evils.

Caesar organised this game, with various people providing figures (some of which were far from accurate but helped make up numbers). The paratroopers would land (deploy) randomly to the right of the table, looking to capture objectives around the bridge. There were some German units on the table, and reinforcements would quickly appear along the long edges.

Here's the brief.

The paratroopers have landed!

They quickly advanced, seeking cover and positions from which to attack the German defenders.

Not really knowing the rules or how odds worked in this game I decided a direct approach was best, and simply assaulted one of the objectives, defended by an 88mm gun. 

Despite horrible casualties I took it.

My other troops were tied up by a couple of building full of Germans. Note that the armoured car represented a jeep with a machine-gun, so was far less impressive than it looked.

With a taste for close combat I moved into the ground-floor of each building, since the Germans had chosen to deploy upstairs. Bryan turned his other 88mm gun on the ground floor of one of his buildings, ruthlessly risking its total collapse (and the loss of his defending squad) in order to wipe out the attacking Americans.

The first of the German reinforcements arrived, sweeping onto the board and assaulting my heavy machine-gun. So that was lost, despite a gallant fight.

Peter wasn't going to be left out of the assaults, and took the other 88mm gun with a wild charge. We now controlled both objectives on our side of the river.

We now had to cross the bridge and take the final objective, then hold them for a couple of turns, but we became pinned down in a firefight on the banks of the canal and aware of steadily increasing numbers of German reinforcements on the other bank. Running out of troops we realised that we simply didn't have the strength to take it and called it a night. 

As games of Bolt Action go it was pretty exciting; thanks to everyone involved in putting it on.

Bolt Action French

I didn't play anything at the club last night, but I did sit in on a game of Bolt Action, and took the opportunity to take a few picture of Ian's French Colonial troops.

The Somua tank was a bit of an issue for the Germans, who had nothing stronger than an anti-tank rifle and 20mm cannon to engage it with. They managed to inflict a pin.

The game went a bit ACW with a section of sunken road. The troops in it got flanked.

Trying out Portrait Mode on my phone. I was told I had to make sure the pin marker showed up nice and clearly.

On an unrelated note, let me just give a shout-out to the anonymous follower of this blog who seems to have enough time on their hands to post a regular stream of abuse in my comments. Once you add your real name to them, I'll be happy to publish the small fraction of them that have acceptable spelling and grammar. Until then, they go straight into the bin.

Bolt Action Pictures

I just popped along to wargaming to observe last night. There were a couple of games of Flames of War going on (part of a campaign, I think) as well as a game of Bolt Action to rehearse for a demo game this weekend.

I assisted with the Bolt Action game by drawing the order dice from the bag, but I also took the opportunity to try out the camera on my new phone, which from first impressions, seems to be a lot better than the old one.

The figures are mostly Caesar's 28mm 8th Army. Enjoy.

Bolt Action On The Volga

The Bolt Action fans in our group are trying out various Stalingrad scenarios at the moment. On Thursday I played in one of them.

The premise is that a group of Soviets are defending a section of the table, and twice their number of Germans are attacking. Meanwhile a blocking force of Germans is attempting to hold off twice their numbers of a Soviet force trying to break through to the defenders.

I played one of the German attacking forces.

We took a fair time to set up and get organised, and it was clear that we wouldn't finish the game before the end of the evening. But we plugged away as best we could.

Here's the view down the table, with the German attackers deployed on the right. The Soviets have yet to deploy.

A better view of the layout. The bottom left of the picture was the objective area; both Germans and Russians got points for having units in this area at the end of the game.

A view from behind the Germans towards the objective.

The German blocking force

Opening moves saw the Germans advancing cautiously. Our mortars, artillery and snipers did a good job pinning down some of teh Soviet defenders, but we quickly took casualties from those not cowed by high explosives.

The relief force arrived, centered around a T34 and a KV2 disguised as a KV1 (someone brought the wrong turret).

The objective area. The orange markers are pins, showing that a lot of fighting was going on. After this photo was taken it boiled down to close assaults, which did not go well for the Germans.

The breakthrough force advanced. They too launched close assaults, and a unit of factory-worker conscripts actually swept away one of the German infantry squads.

At my end of the table I had a PzIII engaged in a duel with an SU76.

At the end of the evening we were only a few turns in and the Germans had lost a significant chunk of their infantry. The Russian breakthrough force was set to do what it's name suggested with little difficulty, and we called the game.

We agreed that it's an interesting scenario setup, but that we need to rethink the terrain to provide more covered approaches for each side and force the action into a series of localised fights with limited visibility. Also with six commands on the table it plays slowly, but we have some ways of speeding that up. We hope.

52 Games - Game 37

Observer Mission

I didn't end up with a club game last night, but I did go along to watch and socialise. We had a good turnout and four games on the go. I managed not to get any detailed pictures of toys, though.

Ralph and Theo played Black Powder (Theo's first game I think).

Caesar and Ian were playing Bolt Action - Russians vs Germans.

Bryan was running a game of Flames of War.

And finally Peter and Geoff were playing a game of Big Battle DBA, with ahistorical armies. It featured this delightful elephant sandwich.

Bolt Action

I gave Bolt Action a try last night, and it was surprisingly fun. Not a game I'd invest in, but delightfully old-school and sufficiently entertaining to while away the evening.

I overdressed for the game; it being the last day of October I squeezed in one more Frocktober outfit.

The game was a 1940 Italian attack on a French position. Mark, a first time Bolt Action player, had put together an Italian force heavily weighted towards armour, so I'm pretty sure that in terms of numbers the French defenders had the edge.

I helped run the Italians. We had an interesting array of tanks, but obviously relying on them was very much an 'all eggs in one basket' scenario. This was borne out by one of them being effectively disabled by an AT rifle ambush the moment it entered the table.

The French also had a couple of AT guns. I tried to use the impressive array of machine-guns on our tanks to suppress the one in front of me, with little success.

Our infantry tried advancing across a couple of walled enclosures, covered by the tanks, but never really got going.

The Italian attack stalled early on; one tank was destroyed outright, two were disabled and the outnumbered infantry came under heavy fire and went to ground. This was pretty much our biggest success of the night - the little CV33 managed to stay out of reach of any French AT capability, and hammered some Senegalese infantry on the French left with enough machine-gun fire to drive them from the field.

Hooray for the CV33!

Birthday Bolt Action

Bolt Action appears to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity at our club, so on Thursday a four-player game was arranged to allow some of us to get used to the rules. It was also Caesar and my birthdays, so there was cake, but not this one; this one was the one I got with my coffee at the cafe we frequent each morning:

Back to the Bolt Action. Members of our group have their own forces, but none have enough to stage a game big enough for four layers. So we threw history out of the window and put together an Axis force (consisting of early war Germans and some Japanese) against an Allied one (Americans and Russians). There was no objective as such; we just lined units up at random and went at it.

I didn't take that many pictures. I had the Americans, and ended up with my troops on each flank. The bulk of my infantry had the cover of some hedgerows, but some sneaky Japaneses can be seen top right.

The other half of my force had a tank, and was on the other flank where they faced a Japanese tank. It didn't last long; it caught fire from the first shot I fired at it, and the crew bailed out.

Gary's Russians were in the centre, mostly in a village. They were charged by some Japanese ...

... and Gary counter-attacked, keen to try out the assault rules. The Russians lost.

The rest of the game seemed to consist of the Americans and one unit of Russian conscripts, mowing down hordes of charging Japanese and groups of cautiously advancing Germans, whilst trying to stay in cover as much as possible. Eventually we reached a point where the Axis troops in the village (and there were a few by the end) were looking down the business-end of  Sherman tank but with no anti-tank support with which to oppose it. It was not going to end well for the Axis.

Bolt Action gives a fast and furious game, mostly because the rules are incredibly old-school and seem to have little in the way of trimming. The activation mechanisms (of drawing dice out of a bag) does force some interesting decisions about when you try and do certain things, whilst firing and movement are very basic. It does feel a bit like a WWII Warhammer, though, with the way troops have special abilities or special units attached to them - we jokingly dubbed it Warhammer 1.94K. It's probably not a game for which I'm likely to buy the rules or any figures, but one I'd play again.

The Thursday Report

I was too tired to consider actually paying any games this Thursday, but I did turn up at the club in order to (i) be sociable and (ii) return Peter's SYW Austrians, which I had acquired after our Kolin game the other week.

Although I didn't play, I did take some pictures of three of the four games on offer.

Geoff and Gary played HOTT - 36AP is still very much the flavour of the month, with MOAB on the way.

Daniel and Bryan had an improvised game of Bolt Action. They had troops, but no cloth or terrain, so used Caesar's 15mm HOTT terrain collection.

Meanwhile at the other end of the room, people were engaged in another of our Super Secret Projects. Shhh.

The fourth game was Caesar's offspring playing Talisman.

Sometimes we come close to looking like a real wargames club.