Mind the Steppe!

With nothing to do the other night for some reason I looked at Bolt Action videos on YouTube and enjoyed some by Eccentric Man especially his piece on 'cheese' at tournaments. I doubt there are not many of you who do not know what 'cheese' is but in a nutshell it is choosing an army simply to win and playing the rules to your own advantage but in a sneaky kind of way, the player may have no affinity with his troops nor be interested in anything remotely historical. I enjoy Bolt Action with friends despite the odd blip but I would not turn up to a tournament, many do however and enjoy it, not everyone wants to win at all costs.

I digress, with my interest fired up I organised a game against Simon and as I have had a lot of fun using the scenarios from the book, despite my previous reservations, we chose Manhunt, where one side had to capture the senior officer of the other side. I won the dice off and decided to be the attacker as I had gone out of my comfort zone with a motorised force of three small veteran squads, a command halftrack, trucks, an armoured car and a Marder III, oh and a sniper. Simon was the Soviet defender and set up with half his troops in and around a small farm building, I could bring on half my troops in the first wave, everything else remained off table and would arrive as reserves. To make things interesting these reserves could arrive on any table edge not used previously by the enemy.

Early morning, somewhere in Ukraine.

Things started fairly well for me, my initial troops seemed to be doing well and began closing in on the farm, there were two large rifle squads at the farm, the officer and a flamethrower. I poured fire into a squad defending a hedge making them hunker down while Simon pushed the other into a nearby wood, this lot gave me a shock as they almost destroyed one of my small veteran squads but I managed to keep the LMG operational and it, along with some reserves wiped out the rash Soviets. At the same time Simon was having trouble bringing on his reserves, I too lost out twice but recovered much faster.

The Germans turn up.

Things start to go wrong, the squad on the hill disappear.

I now advanced to deal with the hedgerow defenders when out popped the damn flamethrower, to my surprise it did no damage but to my chagrin my squad failed its morale and dispersed, I was now down to one squad and an LMG team with which to capture the Russian commander, mission impossible. I saw one possible opportunity as my squad in the wood may have been close enough to rush the officer, sadly Simon moved him back out of range and that was it for me. The Russian reserves had now turned up but did not look like making much of an impact, the tank had a flamer on it so would have to get close to my boys, my Marder was therefore quite capable of taking it out thus giving Simon some pause. I then took the chance to charge the hedge guys with my Marder, there was a decent chance they would break as they were inexperienced, Simon however had a small run of luck and they held, I lost the Marder to an attack by the flamethrower team which I had failed to kill leaving one man to roast my tank destroyer. It  was over we were out of time, however it looked like it would be impossible for me to assault and take the commander with only one squad left and a tank bearing down on it.

Another damn flamethrower.

 There is more to the scenario and I should have put more thought into it, I brought everything on from the one table edge which did me no favours, I also suffered from 'flamer fear' so instead of acting aggressively right from the start I was far too cautious, there seems to be more flamethrowers in games of Bolt Action than were used in WWII. I again found the -2 for Down a hindrance as despite the volume of fire aimed at the guys behind the hedge it was almost impossible to get a kill. Despite all this I would not shirk from playing it again.

I liked my choice of troops, we had 900 points but I could have upped my squads with another hundred, I was disappointed how easily my veterans were taken out but this was mainly down to luck than anything else, especially failing the morale test with two sixes, almost the only thing that would have made them run, aaagh!

Elsewhere we had a large Warhammer Ancients game, also a very big ACW game using a new set of rules (Malvern Hill, probably not the best name for a set of ACW rules if you are a Reb), and Julian and Ryan continued their Frostgrave campaign.