Bolt Action

I gave Bolt Action a try last night, and it was surprisingly fun. Not a game I'd invest in, but delightfully old-school and sufficiently entertaining to while away the evening.

I overdressed for the game; it being the last day of October I squeezed in one more Frocktober outfit.

The game was a 1940 Italian attack on a French position. Mark, a first time Bolt Action player, had put together an Italian force heavily weighted towards armour, so I'm pretty sure that in terms of numbers the French defenders had the edge.

I helped run the Italians. We had an interesting array of tanks, but obviously relying on them was very much an 'all eggs in one basket' scenario. This was borne out by one of them being effectively disabled by an AT rifle ambush the moment it entered the table.

The French also had a couple of AT guns. I tried to use the impressive array of machine-guns on our tanks to suppress the one in front of me, with little success.

Our infantry tried advancing across a couple of walled enclosures, covered by the tanks, but never really got going.

The Italian attack stalled early on; one tank was destroyed outright, two were disabled and the outnumbered infantry came under heavy fire and went to ground. This was pretty much our biggest success of the night - the little CV33 managed to stay out of reach of any French AT capability, and hammered some Senegalese infantry on the French left with enough machine-gun fire to drive them from the field.

Hooray for the CV33!