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    Well my 10th game of Bolt Action was possibly my favourite so far.

    I played my US Airborne against a friend's US Marines (lets call it a training exercise) list with three multiple rocket launchers. We played a scenario with 5 objectives spread across the table.

    Fortunately for me his three multi-launchers couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo despite having the potential to absolutely shred my infantry. Early on one of my bazooka teams took out one of his transports on my left flank although the squad inside managed to survive albeit slightly ruffled. On the right flank all hell broke loose, my light howitzer was an early casualty, with the three man crew all getting gunned down before they'd even had a chance to fire a single round.

    I managed to play fairly cannily and just as my right flank was looking rocky I brought on a squad of engineers, complete with a flamethrower, from reserve. They raced up in their little truck, jumped out and proceeded to absolutely plaster one of my opponents units, although my flamethrower still managed to miss and I immediately rolled a 1 meaning that he ran out of fuel. So far, in 10 games, he's only managed to cause damage once!

    It was all fairly close until turn 4 when I seemed to be edging ahead, I was losing troops but not whole units where as my opponent had lost quite a few order dice (when you lose an entire unit you lose an order dice which has implications for being able to activate and control the initiative) and many of his remaining units were pretty well pinned. This meant that as long as I could hold on the left flank I could push on on the right flank in order to take one of the contested objectives.

    It was all looking good until one of his multi launchers finally hit something and pinned down on of my squads that was moving for an objective. He then managed to activate one guy, who'd lost the rest of his squad and I'd basically left because I didn't think he posed any threat, and was able to run him onto the objective close to my deployment area. This meant, going into the last turn, that unless I could kill him, he'd have control of two objectives to my one (with the other two contested i.e. both of us had units within 3" of it).

    Despite directing as much fire as possible at him and having one last chance with a single guy who needed a 6 to hit, I couldn't kill him and, unfortunately for me, my engineer unit who were on the objective in his deployment zone couldn't get rid of a pesky inexperienced machine gun team who, despite having done nothing else of note during the whole game, were preventing them from holding it.

    In the end, tallying up the points (5 per objective, 1 per unit killed), I lost 17-15, purely because of that one bloody marine!

    It was a cracking game which was really tense right up to the very end.

    Positives, my squads really do have staying power and the added mobility of my engineer squad in their truck paid dividends. Using my bazooka teams as a pair rather than splitting them up meant they could concentrate firepower, although it does mean that they can only control one area they seem much less vulnerable. It'd be interesting to see how they do against a list with proper tanks rather than the jeeps and transports my opponent had. If I can deploy them correctly they have the potential for area denial even if they don't actually blow anything up.

    Negatives, my sniper and mortar team were once again absolutely useless, my light howitzer was gone before I could even use it and I took my eye off the ball at the crucial moment meaning that I managed to snatch a minor defeat from the jaws of victory.

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      Well I took part in my first ever competitive tabletop wargaming tournament today and came a very respectable 11th out of 22, which I'm calling "top half".

      I narrowly lost my first game (made a bit of a silly error to allow my opponent to contest an objective), won my second by a huge margin and then drew my last game when my opponent managed to pass an order check (he needed 7 or less on 2D6) and move a unit to contest the objective with practically the last dice of the game, if he'd not done that I would have won.

      I might type up some quick summaries of the games tomorrow. Not sure who, apart from me, is interested but it feels nice to record some of the details.

      Suffice to say some of my highlights were my flamethrower toasting a truck with an officer inside it, my light howitzer trying to blast some French cavalry riding camels and my two bazooka teams requiring 4 hits to destroy a tiny little French FT17 tank when, in the past, they've one shotted a massive German Tiger...

      My lowlights were winning the first FUBAR award when my Medium Machine Gun team catastrophically failed a morale check about 10 minutes into my first game and my Dodge truck failing to come in from reserve at the required time to drop my engineer squad off within reach of an objective... that was literally it's only job and it failed spectacularly. The engineers had to hump it on foot instead whilst the Dodge eventually came onto the table and just sat behind a building for the rest of the game.

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        Just popped up on Facebook that www.travellingman.com has a sale on this weekend, including Blood Bowl and 40k (eg the boxed game down to £68 from £80) if folk are looking for a few extra miniatures.

        Plenty of board and card games to choose from too

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          Played my 15th (I think) game on Tuesday and my first with my Soviets rather than the US Airborne. Played an objective based mission against my friend with his US Marines.

          It was an interesting match up as his army was almost entirely veterans with a 105mm howitzer Sherman, where as mine had a large component of inexperienced rifle squads supported by an enormous IS-2 tank. I had the advantage in troop numbers although not massively as my IS-2 cost over 30% of my 1000 point total.

          Deployment was different to usual with both of us setting up our armies in diagonally opposite quarters of the 6' x 4' table which was set up as a Stalingrad style winter city ruins.

          I had a slight order dice advantage of 12 to 10 (Bolt Action works by each unit having an order dice which you place in a bag and then each turn one player pulls out a die and that player then uses it to activate one of their units), so it was no surprise when my dice was first out. I used it to fire my Zis-3 AT gun/howitzer at his light howitzer and immediately rolled a 6 meaning it hit and wiped out the entire crew. In the rest of the first turn I continued to roll hot and my mortar was also able to land a shell right onto his mortar, again wiping out the entire crew.

          We traded a few other casualties but no other units were completely destroyed so by the end of turn 1, my order dice advantage had moved to 12 vs 8.

          Where as my dice were rolling high his were performing appallingly. Twice his US air observer called in air support on his own troops, luckily(?) for him both times they were able to shoot the "friendly" plane down!

          There was a few turns of back and forth, his sniper took out my assault engineer flamethrower after he'd fired at a marine squad holding one of the objectives and missed but overall it became fairly obvious that the red tide was relentlessly pushing forward. The Sherman and the IS-2 traded shots, gradually getting closer and closer until the IS-2, at almost point blank range, blew the poor old Sherman to kingdom come.

          To compound my opponents misfortune his veteran 1st lieutenant and his buddy charged my inexperienced commissar and assistant, a fight they should have won fairly comfortably but with the end result of all four of them dying in the ensuing melee.

          We ground it out to the bitter end and he did just about manage to prevent me from taking his main objective, his useless Forward Air Observer having to resort to taking pot shots with his rifle to slow down two of my squads who were poised to grab it, but overall I had control of two objectives with the other two contested. I also had 5 kills to his 3.

          It was fun to play a different army with a completely different playing style but unfortunately it was a less exciting game than we've previously had due to the disparity in our dice rolls.

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            After playing in my first Bolt Action tournament a few weeks back (and absolutely loving it), tomorrow I play my first league match.

            There's 8 of us involved, only one of whom I've played before. Should be fun as I don't think any of us are taking it too seriously. Hopefully my US Airborne can hold out against whatever is thrown against them.

            I've risked going with no armoured support again, although this time I do have a jeep to speed my bazooka team around the table, hopefully allowing them to put pressure on any tanks my opponent brings.

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              Are the lists limited in some way?

              Is your airborne a generic airborne or one from a specific period or theatre or both?

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                I felt a bit rubbish today so went out for a walk. I went to the gaming centre near me where I bought the new version of Blood Bowl a little while back. (They stock bolt action too.)

                I didn't buy anything but when I got home I dug out the unbuilt Blood Bowl stuff. I've glued a sprue of my Lizardmen team. They were fiddler than I expected and I'm expecting them to be a pfaff to paint. I might paint the other figures while they are on the sprue but then that might get fiddly detaching the parts and I don't want to detach the parts and paint them loose because I know I'll lose some bits.

                Anyway I've got 6 figures built and some of them might bulk up one of my other teams as free agents of I ever get round to playing a game.

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                    The chameleon is my favourite

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                      This is the turn counter. It's some kind of frog idol. It's funny and cute!

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                        They look really cool.

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                          I've got most of the right paints for them so will have a go at them one evening next week.

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                            Is everything plastic now? Back in my day of doing Beardhammer Fantasy (4th and 5th editions) plastic was used for the boxes of ten identical figures. Anything else was metal. Mind you, thinking about it, my 5th edition box (1996) had the Bretonnian Knights which were on sprues and could be glued together into different poses, and they looked really cool. Hard as nails too, much better than my previous Slaanesh Chaos army.

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                              Originally posted by Levin View Post
                              Are the lists limited in some way?

                              Is your airborne a generic airborne or one from a specific period or theatre or both?
                              I'm not entirely sure how historically accurate mine is as it's been made using what's called a "generic platoon" listing, where as you can use "theatre selectors" which tend to relate to specific theatres or time periods.

                              I managed to win today's match 15-9 in a mission where there were three objectives, I ended up controlling two to my opponents one, I was also up on kills, five to four.

                              The highlight was probably my light howitzer crew managing to put a highly unlikely shot through the window of a building which contained a 6 man unit, although it still required one of my units to storm the building to finally kill them. A near lowlight was a 7 man squad very nearly losing an assault to two survivors of one of his units that I'd shot up. I was rolling 7 dice to his 2, both needing 5+ to kill, luckily, for me, we drew that round, both rolling one kill and had to go again. If he'd won that the entire game would have swung his way. My genuine lowlight was probably my Dodge 3/4 tonne truck taking a well aimed bazooka shot and getting blown up the turn it had entered the table.

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                                I had this guy to lead them. (Ed - my Bretonnians) Weighed a ton.

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                                  Originally posted by Kevin S View Post
                                  Is everything plastic now? Back in my day of doing Beardhammer Fantasy (4th and 5th editions) plastic was used for the boxes of ten identical figures. Anything else was metal. Mind you, thinking about it, my 5th edition box (1996) had the Bretonnian Knights which were on sprues and could be glued together into different poses, and they looked really cool. Hard as nails too, much better than my previous Slaanesh Chaos army.
                                  I think the majority of stuff is plastic now although there's still a lot of metal figures (pewter rather than tin or lead nowadays). My US Airborne is about 70% plastic with the artillery and a few specialist troops metal. The good thing about a lot of the Bolt Action figures is that they are interchangeable, for instance I was able to use some US Army bits to make some US Airborne sniper and bazooka teams even though the Airborne plastic box didn't contain the pieces to build these, you could only get them as metal miniatures.

                                  Back in my Beardhammer days (I'm old enough to have had 2nd Edition WFB and Rogue Trader/1st Edition 40K) plastics, when they became a thing, were mostly pretty awful and it was the metal miniatures that had all the detailing where as nowadays, if anything, it's the other way round.

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                                    Yes it's all plastic now. The level of detail on them is beyond anything produced in the early days of GW, even the metal miniatures. It makes kitbashing a lot easier.

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                                      Hang on - is Tratorello also posting as tracteur garcon from another device?!

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                                        Originally posted by caja-dglh View Post
                                        Hang on - is Tratorello also posting as tracteur garcon from another device?!
                                        Haha, I hadn't noticed that. My phone, which I rarely use to post on here, must still have my old log in.

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                                          Interesting article about how the pandemic has actually been a boon for tabletop gaming and hobbies in general.

                                          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-57996237

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                                            Mrs Thistle tried to send me that link on WhatsApp this morning and inadvertently sent it on the family WhatsApp which indirectly led to me finding out my brother in law was into Warhammer when he was younger.

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                                              In related news, I put some old WH40K 1st Edition/Rogue Trader bits on eBay expecting to make a few quid but to my absolute astonishment one of the kits has gone for over £200.

                                              I now need to raid my mum's house, especially the attic, as I could be sitting on a fortune!

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                                                I'm mainly into the new Blood Bowl now but I might be interested if you've got any old school BB stuff.

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                                                  Blimey. I think mine all got given away at some point.

                                                  My first general is listed at £40 for just a single figure!
                                                  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Citadel-R...-127635-2958-0

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                                                    This is the fella. I gave him the same name he had on the GW 'combat cards' since I also had this pack for some reason.

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