Bolt Action (other rules are available)

The wargames thing goes back a long way to my childhood. I tried and failed to play proper games, and my mates and I played 'Battles for the Ardennes' which at the age of 12 seemed like a terribly serious game, map based, using counters. We probably weren't even playing it properly. The box was cool though.

Anything with models usually involved far too many tanks and no real plan. I loved to build and paint these tanks and was prolific in my output. The whole thing petered out as these things often do, when I entered my teenage years and felt that playing with models was perhaps a bit of a lame thing to admit to. Now at the age of 45 I don't bloody care what anyone thinks or says, and I'm determined to play a proper game of war with rules and everything.

I claim utter novice status here and so have done the obvious thing and gone for what looks like the highest profile rule set (argue if you want, dude) Bolt Action. I bought the first edition from ebay for next to nothing just after the second edition was released. Clever boy! They seem like good rules from the understanding point of view, and the book looks great. It's everything I wanted wargames rules to be when I was 10, but weren't. So well done @WarlordGames, that's how to get young gamers (and old gits like me) and keep them I reckon.

There of course are lots of other rule sets, and maybe I will try those too. If I can get a satisfactory game out of this I will probably be happy. At the moment I only have the basic rules, but there are lots of add-ons and supplements regarding army lists and actual WW2 campaigns, etc, etc. Also I find Warlord Games to be fairly generous with discount codes, free postage, sprue deals, percentage off deals and so on. I have bought most of my small collection at a fraction of the cost it should have been. The models are already reasonably priced anyway, and competitive with other manufacturers. And no I'm not on commission.

A shaky start!

It wasn't entirely an auspicious occasion, but we played our first game of Bolt Action the other day! I say played a game but it was more like two turns before I got thoroughly lost with the HE rules for my German mortar team. In spite of what I thought was an entire read through of the rule book I was found wanting, and since my opponent is my 11 year old daughter, it wasn't long before attention wandered as I sat with my head in my hands in front of the rule book. There you go, Rome wasn't built in a day and all that. The ever present scenario of me making a balls of it was discussed beforehand, and so it was decided that although we got a bit stuck it was still really good fun. 

Pin markers!

We were well chuffed with the table though, and it can only get better. We were using an 84 x 127cm Woodland Scenics playing mat with all our home made bits and bobs on it. The plan is to get another mat the same size for a bigger table. We learned a lot about the way the table is set up too, and since Bolt Action is a line of sight game, where you put things is really important. Possibly too much on our table for the area we had, our little guys were having trouble drawing a bead on each other!