Bolt Action

By Ian Birdwell

By mid-1944, the Red Tide sweeping across the plains of eastern Europe had finally begun to lap the borders of Hungary.

By August, Romania had switched sides, Hungary was being invaded, and it looked like Germany wouldn’t quite be able to get everything under control.

The fighting in Hungary represents one of my favorite periods in WW2. It’s the junction of almost every nation fighting in Europe. Hungarian infrastructure was destroyed by US and British bombing after all. Taking center stage was the fighting in and around Budapest.

This is the setting for warlord’s latest theater book for in Fortress Budapest.

Now as far as this review goes, I’m going to be taking you all through the broad strokes of the Hungarian section of the book. I’ll go through the new units added into the Hungarian arsenal and the brand new theater selectors able for the Honved!

By Troy A. Hill

Images courtesy of and ©Osprey Publishing Ltd, Warlord Games 2019

I have to admit that I had only a casual sideline historical interest in Europe’s eastern front in WWII. To me, Hungarians and Romanians were always the armies of minor nations that gave the Germans some “cheaper” allies to play in campaigns or tournaments depending on which game system I was playing. How wrong I was.

Thanks to taking the challenge of reading and reviewing new Fortress Budapest Campaign book for Bolt Action, I have a new appreciation of just how important this section of the late war period was to Hitler’s war machine, and why he and Stalin invested so much time, blood and resources into battles that lead the Red Army to conquer Hungary.

by Troy A. Hill (Photos by the author, graphics courtesy of Warlord Games)

I’ve managed to get my US Bolt Action army into a playable state that I’m not embarrassed by. I do still need to finish my various vehicles for it (a few are still in boxes).

My sell-off of models from my previous games garnered me enough hobby dollars to hit up my Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) for a new box from Warlord. Combine this with the new Western Desert book for Bolt Action, with some additional forces, and I’ll be good for the upcoming Duel in the that No Dice No Glory is sponsoring this February at Orccon in Los Angeles.

By Troy Hill

Photos by the Author

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll know that Mitch Reed has begun playing from Warlord Games. He’s mentioned on a few podcasts that I’ve begun the game as well.

Rather than re-walk the newbie road that Mitch has already traversed with three stories and a podcast here on No Dice No Glory, I’d like to take a look at one of the offshoots from Bolt Action: Tank War.

(You can find Mitch’s previous posts on BA here: , , and ).

Bolt Action typically uses the infantry platoon as its core force and limits armoured options for the player to only a few vehicles at most. Tank Wars changes that equation and uses the main Bolt Action rules (with some alterations) to allow armoured vehicles as well as fully mechanized infantry units to play a larger role in the game.

For those who have read my previous on my  (BA) journey, I have just completed my first few BA games in a tourney at the NOVA open. This article will focus on my overall experience in learning Bolt Action and my impressions of the game in general.

With typical beginner luck, I lost my first game 0-4, tied the next game 4-4 and got wiped out in my last game. After a long day of thinking on my feet, playing an unfamiliar ruleset, I walked away from my last game tired. But I loved every minute of play.

Bolt Action has been out since the early Twenty-teens (German 1st Edition Book published in 2012). I have no clue as to how I missed it for so long.

The game uses dice to activate your units. Each unit provides one order die. Each player throws a set of uniquely colored order dice into a bag. One per unit in your force. A die is blindly drawn, and the player to whom the die belongs gets to activate a unit. This mechanic is at the heart of the game, and the random simulation of the “vagaries of the battlefield” effect it provides is one reason, I believe, why the game is so good.

I hope many of you checked out my first article about learning how to play . It covered the initial steps I took to collect, paint, and read the rules which culminated in signing up for a major Bolt Action event. This article will detail the list I plan to use for the event and will cover about how list making plays a part in Bolt Action and other games we play.

Make a List and Check it Twice
It has always been my opinion that list building is the game behind the game. It keeps us thinking about the game when we are not painting or actually playing it. The vendors probably see list building as the unseen hand that forces us to purchase more models and to keep the buzz going 24/7.

Why does list building take up so much of our time? I think the answer is simple, it is an extension of the game we can “play” at any time. It also represents the analytical side of the game where we try to find the perfect combination. I am guilty of spending a lot of time list building, I really enjoy it and I am attracted to games that have list building in it.

While this may not be popular with some, I think other than assuring you have a rules legal list there is no “Perfect” list or any list that will assure you success. A lot of factors in games are not covered by lists,   terrain, your opponent’s forces, and missions. Nor can you predict how your dice rolls will come out. On top of this, during a game, we run into so many possible unique situations and we analyze these quickly in order to make decisions on what moves to make, as this is happening your list makes little difference, however knowing what the units can do makes a lot of difference.

Hi my name is Mitch and I am a gamer.

Our podcasts seem to have one drug reference in each episode, so it’s a well-worn joke to many of us here at NDNG. We’re always jonesing for that next gaming fix.

We are always looking for that new game to pick up in which we invest time and money for the ultimate payoff which is to have Fun.

So. over the last few months, I took the excitement of my latest enabler, Jon Russell from and decided to give Bolt Action a try. Bolt Action is now in its second edition and has been around for a while now. Two editions and I hadn’t tried it yet? Why not?

Perhaps it was for the same reason many gamers don’t try new games? We tend to look for the bad in a game in order to give us an excuse to ignore it. But, the only time I heard anything bad about Bolt Action was one person say it wasn’t his cup of tea. This excuse gave me the ability to avoid the game, to not paint 28mm models, and not pick up another money and time suck.