Sunday, May 02, 2021

Experimenting with Bolt Action

The Bolt Action unique turn system provides a great game, but it doesn't work well for very large games.  In such games it become ponderous & slow. Today we experimented with playing Bolt Action with an IGoUGo turn sequence to see if it did indeed speed up play & whether the game worked that way.  The idea being to look at developing a house variant suitable for fighting large battles, possibly with 15mm figs.

Jim's Panzer Platoon v. Chris' Soviet armour.  1,500 pts Tank war with just 2 objective (two bridges near the centre of the 8'x6' table).

We found that the game did indeed flow much more quickly than standard BA.  The basic combat systems in BA are simple enough to suit large actions.  It is the need to advance the game unit by unit that slows big games down.  There are some not obvious tweaks required with the change, but we decided it was an idea worth taking further.In this battle the Germans concentrated their forces better, seized the objectives early & held off the Soviet counterattacks to win. 

3 comments:

Tas 1812 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tas 1812 said...

Take 2:

Hi Jim,

Watching this with interest to see where it goes. Recently we've played a few games BA of up to 3000pts using double activations be dice drawn, kept the game going fast enough and trialling it again this week, will let you know the result.

cheers, Dave.

Jim Gandy said...

A similar option we've tried is group activation - allowing groups of adjacent units doing the same thing to be activated by one command dice (with only 1 command dice per 2 units in the bag).