Another Italian Campaign Bolt Action Game at Adler Hobby

Last Thursday I played another game in the Adler Hobby Bolt Action Italian league/campaign. This was scenario #9 from the main rule book. It was one of the attack & defend scenarios and again I was lucky enough to defend.

My opponent Barry was super fun to play against. He had wonderfully painted figures, knew the rules well and had a great battle plan. He overwhelmed my left flank with nearly all his assets with a flamethrower engineer squad filtering through the town to eventually assault the left most victory point. The game extended into an extra turn and the victory point changed hands twice as we each desperately threw units into the fray. The end it was a single panzergrenadier NCO re-taking what he was originally defending for the win.

 

It is hard to pick an MVP for this battle. My mortar disabled Barry's M8 Scout Car with a lucky drop right into the open top of it. One of my infantry squads held and eventually re-captured the objective, and my flamethrower heroically destroyed a whole infantry squad on its own. 

Tooth-and-nail fight for sure!

 

More Bolt Action at Adler Hobby

Yesterday I got my first game in for the Adler Hobby Bolt Action Italian campaign. My opponent, Dan, and I selected 750 points and rolled up one of the attack and defend missions from the core rule book. It took a while for me to blow off the rust and get back into the hang of playing Bolt Action V2. Dan was a great opponent: fun to play with, knew the rules better than I did and was good tactically. The game ended up in a draw after the prescribed seven turns for the scenario. The scenario had a variable end turn of six or seven. At turn six I had the win sealed up, but in turn seven Dan got aggressive with one of his squads and assaulted my anti-tank rifle team that was holding the center objective eliminating it. That sealed the draw. Good play and it came down to which dice came out of the bag first. Had it come up mine first, it could have been a different story.

Dan pushed British paratroopers. Veterans with captured German LMGs. The veteran status saved him MANY casualties. I was able to get hits, but his veterans resisted casualties quite well. 

My deployment as the defender. Note the purple pin markers across the board. The scenario called for an initial bombardment by the attacker that was quite effective. I used all of my dice in turn one on rally orders across the board.

The other, more densely terrained table had another campaign game going on using Bolt Acton Firefight rules. I was too engrossed in my game to get more photos or an outcome.

Bolt Action At Adler Hobby - 2/18/2022

Last Friday I played in a WWII Italian theater game at Adler Hobby. The rules used were the popular Bolt Action 2nd Edition. This was a kick-off game for the upcoming Italian store campaign 

There were two games. I played in a Germans vs. British game and the other table was a scenario game with Americans vs Italian captured R.35s from the Warlord Soft Underbelly campaign book.

Good night had by all! Additional photos are available on this google photos gallery. 

28mm Finnish Specialists

I'm heading to Adler Hobby this weekend to play some Bolt Action Firefight. I thought it would be fun to take some of my newly painted Finnish up and get them on the table. After looking over the Firefight PDF, I realized that I really wanted a medium machine gun and/or a sniper. I also didn't have a particularly great officer figure painted up. 

Rummaging through my Finnish lead I found everything I needed: one Maxim machine gun team, a charismatic officer and a sniper with observer assistant. All of the figures are Warlord miniatures. I tossed them on the painting table and got them done. Nothing fancy as time was of the essence. I primed them in Panzer gray, then gave them a quick coat of Basillicum Gray contrast paint for the coats and Black Templar contrast paint for the dark grey pants. The rest of the work was done using traditional paints. Once done I gave the coats some highlights with neutral gray just to make them pop a bit more. I painted all six of these figures while watching some of my club mates play a game of Saga age of Hannibal over Zoom. What a GREAT evening. About two and a half hours to paint up all six figures with maybe another twenty minutes to base them up.

The Maxim MG with it's ski bipod. I've chosen to leave the skis on the bipod as I don't think they took them off in the summer, preferring the 'float' the skis gave over muddy and marshy ground. These figures are for the Lapland war, so I've based them on spring/summer bases.

The sniper and his observer assistant. Nothing fancy, just good solid figures from Warlord. The sniper I believe would be using the excellent Mosin-Nagant rifle - still considered one of the most accurate rifles of the war.

  

Finally, the officer. He's carrying a pistol. It looks like a revolver, but I'd expect he'd more likely be carrying a Lahti L-35 semi-automatic pistol. The only likely revolver would be a Russian Nagant M1895 - a trophy from the Winter war? 

I like this figure a lot with his fur-collared overcoat. I was tempted to paint it in black leather - possibly a gift from a German officer during the Continuation war, but I didn't want him to look too German. In the end I opted for good old grey wool. Period photographs show a lot of the Finnish officers wearing these.

Six figures to add to the 2021 painting totals.

Iron Cross at Adler Hobby (2)

This was my last game of 2016. Marc D. and Gordon from Adler Hobby wanted to give Iron Cross another go and they invited me up to Gordon's store to join them. While we were setting up Bob showed up and helped Mark with the first few turns of the game until he had to leave. For more photos, and a summary from the French side of the table, you can read Mark's post about this game on his blog.

Mark and I matched up mirror armies to each other, Free French for Bob and Mark and Germas for Gordon and I. Each force consisted of a CinC, four infantry detachments, a medium machine gun, a flame-thrower team, a mortar, an anti-tank gun, an SP anti-tank gun (Marder III for me, GMC half track with AT gun for Mark), a recon armor piece (Stuart for Mark, SdKfz 222 for me) and a medium tank each (Mark's Grant was used but we used Serman factors for it and I used a Panzer IV). We wanted to load up on vehicles and see how that worked with AT guns and mortars to try out all the rules.

This second time through, I believe we got almost all the rules right. The game was fun and played fast even with two new players in the mix. We learned that the MMGs were very powerful when they hit with all of their dice, and that anti-tank fire, while it can be very devastating, can also outright miss. Mortars are great when they hit and feel right, with multiple activations making them more likely to hit and more effective when they do. Flamethrowers seemed just right as well being good against enemies in cover but vulnerable to incoming fire. Even with three vehicles on the table for each side, I don't believe the vehicles unblananced the game. We equipped our infantry teams with bazookas and panzerfausts, and when infantry advanced on un-supported tanks, the tanks were in trouble and had to withdraw or could have been destroyed. Armor supported with infantry seemed to work nicely.

The game started off with Mark's MG team wiping out one of our infantry detachments and our Mortar pinning the MG in return. In the following turns Bob pressed our right flank with an infantry team trying to capture the tall building on the hill. Gordon's AT gun blew up the Grant which shook up the nearby infantry and mortar team. The advancing team reached the tall building, but then got blown away by combined 222 MG fire and infantry fire. Likewise my MMG took out Mark's MMG in a single turn of sustained MG on MG action. My Marder III lived a charmed life bouncing a side shot from the Stuart and then withdrew behind the hill not wanting to press its luck.

On the other Flank Bob's infantry team swept around the ruined building and took out our flame-thrower team at the end of a turn when the French had activation tokens left and we had spent all of ours. The following turn our Panzer IV reacted to this advance and with the help of our lone infantry detachment on that flank, held long enough for us to call time as Mark had to leave.

These are simple, fun, fast-play rules. While they cover almost everything you need, we found one glaring omission. The rules cover movement through terrain, but don't seem to have any line-of-sight rules in them. For this game we used the Bolt Action rule for area terrain - you can see into but not through it. This helped, but still seemed lacking when shooting through multiple pieces of linear terrain. I think using Bolt Action's area terrain rule and additionally using Chain of Command's linear terrain rule will make it 'just right'.

Iron Cross - 28mm WWII at Adler Hobby

Today I stopped by the Adler Hobby Boardgame Cafe to visit with Gordon and Earl while the three of us learned how to play Iron Cross. Gordon set up his "Italian Steel" scenario which we used to give the rules a run through. I arrived late while Earl and Gordon were well into the first turn so I kibitzed, read the rules and attempted catch up with the game as they played it. I wasn't the GM, but I attempted to help out as best I could in that role.

Iron Cross is a simple rule set, but with an interesting activation and reaction mechanism that adds the required detail, friction and in some cases chaos required to give the game a 'battlefield' feel. Gordon had great success early with his tanks, but as he closed to the required distance to engage the scenario's target, the Austrian command post, Earl's infantry assaults and Boys AT rifles started to do their work. Eventually Earl's reserve 2-pounder portees arrived and really made Gordon pay. Gordon attempted to 'go for broke' ignoring the 2-pounders and focusing on the objective. Gordon knocked out one of the fortification's two walls, but as he did the portees knocked out his tanks one by one. In the last photo you can see the carnage. With the objective compromised, but not knocked out the objective points were a draw, but with all but one of the Italian tanks knocked out, Earl could claim victory.

We played a few things wrong the first play through, but nothing really hampered the fun or the game play. After looking through the rules after the game, Gordon and I figured out most of what we did wrong so a second game will go a lot more smoothly. I'm hoping to run a few games in my basement to continue to give these rules a good try out. Best of all, once you buy the base rule book (at a VERY affordable $22.00 MSRP) all the remaining resources, army lists, etc. are available for free on the Great Escape Games Website.

Bolt Action WWII at Adler Hobby

Yesterday I stopped by the Adler Hobby Boardgame Cafe to do some shopping and visit with my friend Gordon, the owner. Adler Hobby is a full board game and wargame hobby store and also has a gaming cafe, where you can play board games and war games. While I was shopping and visiting, Gordon had a couple of customers come in and request to play his "Italian Steel" Bolt Action scenario. Gordon offered me a spot in the game, and since I had the afternoon free I accepted.

This is a fun scenario, and surprisingly, the small infantry force of elite Australians actually has a fair chance to win against the all-armored force of the Italians. For this game it came down to the last Italian tank available on the last turn to destroy the Australian fortress. Luckily for us, it succeeded. A narrow victory. You can see from the photos below the carnage as tank after tank got knocked out by the plucky Aussies with their anti-tank grenades.

Bolt Action at Adler Hobby

Last weekend I visited Gordon at Adler hobby to play some Bolt Action. Gordon is bringing his North Africa colonial Italian force to the Cold Wars Bolt Action tournament and he wanted to get in some practice with the tournament scenarios. I brought along my newly painted German equipment and some painted figures I purchased on Ebay and tried my best to give Gordon a game. My force, which was not particularly tournament tuned, was easily tromped by Gordon's flame thrower tank, armored car and Besigleri infantry. Gordon's camels and cavalry looked great and while fragile, pack a punch.  It was good seeing Chris and Eric as well as Gordon for a generally entertaining game and B.S. session.

Bolt Action at Adler Hobby

Yesterday I got the chance to do some rare Sunday gaming thanks to the Labor Day holiday on Monday here in the USA. Gordon at Adler hosted a day of Bolt Action gaming at his store complete with catered lunch of meatball subs and Italian ice for desert thanks to a contribution by Scott.

I played in a historical scenario Gordon is working adapted from a scenario book. It's a North African battle that actually happened pitting Italian light armor M13/14 'medium' tanks against a desperate force of Australians defending an old desert fort with just some Boys anti-tank rifles and a couple of portee 2 pounder anti tank guns. To successfully delay the Italians the Aussies would have to get up close and personal with anti-tank grenades and side armor shots with the Boys ATRs.

This scenario was well played by the Aussies, led by Chris helping new players Jeff and Marco learn the rules. On the Italian side we had Marco's son Guillermo and me being tutored by the other experienced player, Dan. This was my first game of Bolt Action actually playing and it was easy to learn and quite fun. The scenario seemed very well balanced for a first play. The Italians were down to their last shot on their last tank of the last turn. Hit and they win, miss and the Australians win. Very close with the Italians squeaking out the victory. 

 

On the other table some of the more experienced players played a four player game in the ruins of Berlin. I believe it was Americans against Germans, so western Berlin I would assume. I'm unsure of the outcome but everyone seemed to be having a great time.