Bolt Action

By Andy Allcock

Greetings! Let me introduce myself. I’m Andy, I’ve been wargaming since I was a young teenager. I started with Warhammer 40k (2ed) and moved shortly afterward into historical and fantasy gaming.  A buddy and I wrote our own ruleset years ago, and I’ve been known to know where and how to find rules in other games.

For 2022 I’ve decided to start yet another Bolt Action army.  I’ve already got early Germans, late war winter Germans, British Commandos, British 8^th Army, USMC (which I play as 1^st cav), Africa Italians, and regular Italians. With such a widespread of armies, I decided it was time to dive into the French.

By Troy Hill

After two years of miss or hit, mostly miss gaming, we’ve finally had our first Bolt Action tourney in North-East Indiana. Power Nine Gaming in Fort Wayne Indiana hosted our Rumble in the Fort, Bolt Action tourney. I was the humble Tourney Organizer (TO), and we hoped to have five tables. Going into the week, it looked like we might make that.

But, cold-like symptoms, such as sore throats, kept two players home. We ended up with seven players, and I jumped into the roster as the “ringer.”

By Troy Hill

The long awaited chance for Warlord Games to get a decent set of army special rules for the Italian forces is finally …. not here yet.

Don’t get me wrong. The new Campaign Italy: Soft Underbelly book is great when you hold it in the context for which it is intended. That being a historical approach to gaming the invasion of Sicily during Operation Husky and beyond.

For those Bolt Action gamers hoping for a new set of Italian Army rules that brings the Italian army into the competitive zone most other armies get in the game… yeah, that didn’t happen here either. In context, a competitive Italian Army wasn’t to be had in the invasion of Sicily nor the Italian mainland.

But, if you’re into a historical approach to your gaming, instead of just pounding away with the meta and special rules to dominate in tourneys, this is an excellent book.

By Kreighton Long

While window shopping for light artillery models for my WW2 Romanian army I found limited options to choose from. While Great Escape Games makes a fine looking Romanian light artillery piece (one will make its way into my arsenal eventually) I wanted to challenge myself with a bit of conversion work to add variety to my three-light artillery Romanian list for Bolt Action.

For my conversion attempt I began with the wooden spoked wheel variant of the WWI French style 75mm gun as found in the Warlord Games . The crew themselves needed a little customization to make them more Romanian which is where the conversion work was done for this piece. I did attempt to find a way to modify German, Soviet, and American helmets to the point where they would pass as Romanian but the solution alluded me.

By Troy Hill

I didn’t realize how much I missed other gamers until I had to go about 18 months without seeing them.

True, we stayed connected on social media. And a lot of us used TableTop Simulator, or Roll20 to get in virtual games.

But there is nothing like being back in person. Seeing friends (for me, new friends that I barely got to know last winter. I forget if we had a March game day (maybe?)

This technically wasn’t my first game back from the great distancing. We had one of those in June. Back then we had four players at our North-east Indiana Bolt Action day. Our group gets together once a month for Bolt Action on the second Saturday of the month, and again on the fourth (occasionally the fifth weekend if there is one). This Saturday we had five players for Bolt Action. Not bad. We’d had a few drift off to other games, or still ensconced in catching up with family. Five is a good number. Except someone has to take on two opponents…

Yep. That someone was me. And mistakes were made.

By Kreighton Long

In honor of my new home in Virginia, and for a less commonly seen WWII US Army theme, I decided to design my US Army on the 29th Infantry Division.

The 29th was a National Guard division recruited from northern Virginia, Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania.  The division deployed to the European Theater of Operations and took part in the amphibious landing at Omaha Beach, bocage fighting in Normandy, siege warfare at Brest in Brittany, then urban fighting and battles of maneuver in Germany.

By Kreighton Long

Survivors from the mornings spoiling attack march back into town under the watchful eyes of their fellow defenders. The spoiling attack succeeded in delaying the advance of the British paratroopers and more importantly, their vehicle support.

The German soldiers have a short time to rest and refit for they know the British are close behind them. Ammo pouches are restocked and a few bites of food are swallowed just in time for the officers and NCOs to rouse their men to their battle position.

The church, which is located in the center of town just as God and religion was the center of life when the town of Colline de L’église was built so many centuries ago, must be held. A German sniper in the church’s bell tower reports sighting British infantry nearing the town and the engine of a nearby assault gun roars to life.

By Troy A Hill

One of the joys and pitfalls of moving into a new area, and joining a new gaming group is that many of the local players in the new area already have their army builds done. When I lived in Southern California, there were a mix of players and armies. In my regular gaming group, no one was playing British, so I picked it up to compliment my US and my German Armies.

But, when I returned to North East Indiana in the States, and looked up the local crew, the most popular nation to play in the new local gaming group is… yep, British of one flavour or another.

What was I to do? Americans are the vanilla “easy mode” according to the Juggernauts. In my 15mm WWII wargaming days, I began with Americans and soon tired of them. Germans are definitely challenging. And with my grandmothers coming from lineages of Kaiser and Sigsbee surnames on one side, and Bechtel on the other side of the family, the German army seems like a good fit for me. So far, though, my interest in all things German seems limited to the DAK.

Well, when I played Warhammer Fantasy, I loved the horde armies of the goblins. Guess I should look at… The Soviets?

By Robert Kelly

This article originally appeared in WWPD many years ago.  I thought it would be worth dusting it off and updating it for those who missed it the first time or are new to the game.

In  all you have to know about ranging in on a target is that you have to have guns available, an observer with eyes on the target and that you have to roll dice. In real life, it was a bit more complicated than that, but not much. Having served 18 years in the Royal Canadian Artillery I’ll explain how the Commonwealth artillery would have ranged in, but the same principles apply to other countries as well.

By Kreighton Long

Gamers have a variety of means of marking progress and mechanics in their games. The means of doing so range as wildly as the reasons we need to track them. Whether the game calls it stress, fatigue, or pins, we can use tokens, dice, or counters.

Players of Bolt Action deal with pins, a game concept that functions against a unit’s morale.

Marking pins on the table can be as simple or fancy as the player wants it to be. For my games, I decided that I wanted to create a way of tracking pins that would blend into the table and compliment the aesthetic as much as possible.

After some digging around I came across appropriate casualty markers from .

For this project specifically, I used a . The core idea here was to create a scenic looking marker combining a casualty model with a slot where a 9mm D6 can be turned to represent the number of pins on a unit. After completing the test piece shown below I’m committing to working on a set for personal use with my WWII German armies.