A Quick Update

Hello peeps.  Sorry for the recent inactivity on the TMFT, but things have been fairly busy lately and not left a lot of time for blogging!  Short story; being single for the first time in sixteen years is taking some getting used to!

First things first, a big thank you to Tamsin for her recent giveaway.  Her generosity means I've now another nine spaceships from GZG added to the painting pile.

This week, we finally managed to squeeze in a couple games of Dreadball.  I'd delegated painting the box set to Adam from the club.  He'd obviously thoroughly preparing himself for the task as they've, as yet, no actual paint on them.  I'm sure he'll do a great job though. . . . . . eventually.

To the game itself.  I'd had a read through of the rules before we played, but couldn't honestly remember much at all. Adam guided me through the first game and, although we made a fair few mistakes, were impressed enough to have another game.  The core mechanic is success based dice rolls (aim to roll more successes than your opponent) as opposed to rolling a higher dice score than your opponent.  There are several skills and stats you roll against, usually with three dice, but with a lot of modifiers.  A bit confusing at first, but once you get the mechanic, the game becomes massively enjoyable.

It's generally a good sign of a game when halfway through your first play, you're already thinking "I'm going to buy this and this next week."   We played one game each with the two starter teams, but both games generally dissolved into the Orx player thumping the humans at every opportunity.  Great fun.

I also sat in on a game of Bolt Action, hosted by Tom and a couple others (whose names escape me just now.)  I've read the rules and have a couple of the supplements, but haven't gotten it to the table myself yet.  My biggest concern was the random activation sequence (blindly drawing dice from a bag,) in that I worried that tactical decisions would be overruled by unlucky dice draws.  Based on the game I saw, that doesn't seem to be a concern.  I've some 28mm Soviets in storage so I'll try and get a few painted up in time for a game.

Lastly, away to Spain for a week next week.  The old man has taken pity on me and paid for a wee break there (it helps that he owns a house there.)  Nothing planned except some reading and relaxing, but I do fancy a day trip to Cartagena for a wander round the Roman ruins.  So, if nothing appears here for another week or so, you can assume my pasty Scottish skin is getting gently roasted by the sun!  Have a good week everyone.

Bolt Action - First Impressions

Amazon managed to send out Bolt Action rulebook, only about ten days after the official release date, which wasn't too bad.  So ends my attempts to paint up a platoon before the rules were released (who am I kidding, I'd have a better chance of becoming Prime Minister than finishing a nerd project on time!)  I thought I'd put up some of my first impressions from the rules, not a review as such, just what jumped out at me after reading and playing.

Physically, Bolt Action is similar to Osprey's other hardback rulebooks like Force On Force or the Field of Glory range; lots of artwork from both Orsprey and Warlord Games, as well as lots of photos of Warlords miniatures.

The rules themselves take up about half of the book, with the scenarios and army lists take up the remaining pages.  Although that is a lot of pages of rules, the basic rules themselves are surprisingly brief, particularly as the pages are taken up with lots of diagrams and photos.  In keeping with Warlord's other rulebooks, there are also lots of little panels filled with trivia about particular weapons, tanks or anecdotes from World War 2, a really nice touch.

The order system is a nice little element to the game, nothing ground breaking, but it simply means that activating a unit isn't always automatic (think Black Powder or Hail Caesar.)

The random unit activation doesn't seem as much of a negative as I thought it would be, in fact, there looks to be a bit of depth to the mechanic.  Quickly, each unit in the game has an order dice, all dice from both sides are placed in bag or cup and are drawn out one at a time, each dice lets the relevant player activate one unit.  A couple of things to keep in mind; forcing a unit to go "down" before it has activated removes it's order dice from the pool, giving your opponent less activations that turn, while going into "ambush" makes one of your own dice unavailable for the next turn, again limiting the activations available.

The pinning mechanic is very simple, but elegantly affects every facet of the game.  Again quickly, a unit takes one pin marker for each enemy unit that fires upon it (some weapons inflict more than one marker,) each pin marker inflicts a -1 modifier to your order tests, shooting attacks and morale tests.  So more pins makers, the harder it is for your unit to be effective.  It's kind of a risk management mechanic where you have to decide to actively remove pin markers or to try to move or attack and manage the pin markers on your unit. Simple concept, lots of depth.

Combat looks pretty straightforward, a standard "to hit" score of 3+ with lots of modifiers (mostly negative,) with a fixed kill score based on how experienced your troops are.  A nice wee twist to the shooting is that if a "to hit" score goes above 6+ (Bolt Action only six sided dice exclusively,) the roll simply becomes a 6 followed by a 6, so no having to work out what an 8+ or 9+ would be.  Again, shooting looks to be pretty quick with just the two steps (roll to hit, roll to kill,) which kind of explains why the sample army lists from Warlord Games were much larger than I thought they would be.

Close quarters (melee) combat is suitably brutal, even more so than in Flames of War. Simply charge, take the defence fire, then both sides roll to kill.  No saves of any kind and assaults are always resolved in one turn, with one unit being removed from the table.  In rare circumstances, it looks possible for both units to wipe each other out too.

There are a nice mix of weapon and unit special rules, many of which aren't used with the army list in the book.  Presumably, we'll see a lot more of these in the nation supplement books.  Most of the special rules read like they are appropriate to what they are describing, flamethrowers work like they should, assault weapons are good in assaults, that kind of thing, but I haven't tried out too many of them yet.

The six scenarios included in the book are mixed nicely and are simply what you would expect from a wargame rulebook.  There's a free-for-all mission, a hold the line mission, a couple objective missions etc.  Nothing startling springs out at me, but on the other hand, nothing seems out of place or missing either.

I've only skimmed through the vehicle, building and artillery rules, all of which look appropriate enough, if a little simple when it comes to vehicle profiles, my concern being there isn't a huge amount of difference between different tanks etc.  The four army lists have a good mix of units for each nation, with options for veteran and green troops, along with plenty of support units.  A little flavour is added through the different army special rules, eg. the feared German machine guns roll extra shooting dice, while the Soviets get a free squad of conscripts for their army.  Nice enough, but I hope there will be a lot more depth from the nation supplement books.

Having only had a couple small games, I'm pretty impressed by Bolt Action.  The rules are simple enough to grasp the basics on the first read through, but I think there will be enough depth to keep me interested.  As with all games, how enjoyable you find Bolt Action will depend on different factors, most of which are nothing to do with the rules themselves; your opponent, your armies and the table you play on.  I'm looking forward to getting some games in at the club in the near future.

P.S.  Sorry for the wordy post, still having trouble uploading images, I had to resort to hotlinking the picture above!

Bolt Action Plans

Although I don't have the rule book yet, I've been looking at the options for my Waffen SS force for Bolt Action.  Thanks to a couple great posts on WWPD and the Warlord Games site, you can get a rough idea how many points your force will amount to.

Firstly, my initial force should look something like:

Officer with a radio team and a medic
2 squads each with 1 LMG, 2 smg, 1 assault rifle and 1 Panzerfaust
81mm Mortar team
MG42 HMG team

That should come in at just under 500 points and, handily, includes all the stuff I either have at the moment or have ordered and am waiting for.  Once they've all been painted and (presumably) I've managed to have a few games, I think I'll add in:

PaK 40 team
MG42 team (another one)
Panzerschreck team (or two)
1 reduced squad with 1 LMG and an smg 
Armour, either a Panzer IV or a StuG

That should take the force upto the 1000 point mark.  From this point, assuming I've still got the mojo for it, I'd like to double up the LMGs and add some halftracks for a full panzergrenadier force, drop in some specialist troops like a snipers, flamethrowers or pioneers and maybe .  Based on Scipio's effort  I also really want to paint up a Schwimmwagen (ain't it cute!)

P.S.  Our internet access is still out and the mobile broadband stick I've got is really playing up, hence no photos or WIP shots lately.

Bolt Action SS - WIP 2

Just a quick update on the Waffen SS figures.  Camo patterns are almost all done, only the dots on the Pea Dot scheme need added, and I've started the detailing and equipment.

Mostly happy with how the camo looks so far.  The Oak Leaf looks the best to me, with a good bright green.  The Plane Tree looks really good up close, but from further away, the brown looks kind of washed out, I may go over the brown in a darker shade, but maybe not. The Pea Dot pattern still doesn't look right, the tan/light brown colour and the green both look off to me.  I'll see how it looks after the dots are added, but don't think it will make a huge difference.  So far this has been a decent learning experience, as I've mixed quite a few colours myself and tried a couple different tricks.

Next job is getting the equipment painted.  I really like mixing up the colours used on late war Germans; the idea being that with their supply problems, these guys will have picked up equipment whereever they could get it, so different helmets, breadbags, gaiters etc.  My new bases arrived so I can get to work on the next batch of figures, more riflemen and the squad LMG.  I'd like to get these finished at the weekend, but recent history suggests it'll be a bit before they're ready to go!

Bolt Action SS - WIP 1

Some WIP pics of the first seven Waffen SS figures.  Two NCO's with MP40s, two with StG44 assault rifles and three with good old Kar98 rifles.  I need a larger base for the LMG team, so I'm waiting for them to arrive; the rest are based on 2p coins.  I've managed to stick to the "do something every day" ethos this week and am relatively happy with the progress I've made.  There are another dozen or so figures prepared and based, but I'm only working on a few at a time.

The first job was to paint all the skin on the seven figures (I hate painting faces, I'm terrible at it,) before starting on the camo patterns.  I'm just winging it at the moment, using Google to get an idea of the patterns and an Osprey book for the colours.  The first two figures, in Oak Leaf Spring camo, taught me that I can't add shade very well, so now I'm working from a much darker basecoat and highlighting up before adding the camo pattern.  Hopefully it will turn out ok.

They are by Warlord Games and I have to say that they are really excellent sculpts.  Some very dynamic poses along side some great expressions on some of the figures.  Of course, as metal miniatures, they take an absolute age to prepare, too many mould lines and flash, but definitely worth the effort. 

Going forward, I plan to finish all the camo patterns before moving onto the equipment.  Still undecided whether or not to use metallic paints or to try my pseudo-nmm technique.  I think they would look better the second way, but for convenience they might get the old Boltgun Metal, wash, highlight treatment.