March 10, 2014

2014 Bolt Action 'Soviet Union vs United States'

Sunday March 9th, 2014 my son and I headed over to Empire Games to play a 1000 point game of Bolt Action. I had wanted to get a game in the garage, but I spent all day Saturday working on terrain and did not get to finish it, so I had terrain laying across our gaming table.

For this game I had wanted to try one of the Attacker/Defender scenarios from the book, so during the week we built our army lists based on the scenario "Point Defence"

Sunday 3/9/2014
Points: 1000
Scenario: Point Defence
Objective: The attacker must try and capture the three objectives.
Armies: Soviet Union (Dean) vs United States (Dragi)

My son's US army were going to be the attackers, and my Soviets were the defenders. In this game I was trying out my new 'Sniper Team' for the first time.

We did forget to do the 'Preparatory Bombardment' special rule to start the game off, this would have really helped the Americans out.

The Americans were holding two Infantry units in 'outflank' along with a Half-track, and the Soviets kept their free Rifle squad in 'outflank', The rest of the Soviets were deployed on the table in defensive positions protecting the objectives.

This is the first game where I actually played with a lot of assaults. We had four assaults in this game all between Turns 4 and 5.

Turn 4 the American Half-track entered on my left hand side of the table to go for an objective. The Half-track fired on my Veterans protecting the objective, the Veterans 'Ambushed' with a Panzerfaust grenade but missed. Later that turn the Americans disembarked from the Half-track and laid down some fire on the Veterans. Turn 5, I was able to pass my order test on those Veterans and assaulted the Americans, after two rounds of combats, the Soviets prevailed and then consolidated back to protecting the objective. The left flank was still protected.

On my right flank the Americans outflanked with another Infantry unit towards an objective. My Soviet Guards squad 'Ambushed' with 2 LMG's in their unit killing 8 Americans, and the Americans failing their 'morale test' and removed from the board. The right flank was still protected.

Coming up the center of the board was an American Veteran squad and Regular squad followed by their Lieutenant. We had a Veteran on Veteran assault in the middle of the board, with the Soviets being the victor. Then the American Lieutenant assaulted my Soviet Senior Lieutenant. The Soviets could not prevail in this one with the Americans wining that assault. 5 inches away was a Soviet Anti-tank team with the guts to assault the American Lieutenant and managed to score 2 kills on the American Lieutenant.

All the Americans had left was a handful of Regular Infantry coming up the center of the board, the game entered Turn 7 but the Americans were more than 12" from any objective to make a 'Run' for one of the objectives. The game ended with a massive Soviet win.

Besides forgetting the initial 'Preparatory Bombardment', the game flowed quite smoothly without any real 'rules queries'.

Here are a few shots I did manage to take of the game. I really like playing on tables that look full with terrain, so that was my goal when setting up this table with the terrain that was available.