Blasted and Beaten Down

I went around to George's to try out the demo board he's been working on for the Bolt Action game.  Given he'd only spent a month of his spare time on the boards, the finished result (with my reworked buildings and wrecks) looked really good:

A nice touch is the shot down German fighter, which provides a distinctive touch of period to the battlefield, the work George had done to place the terrace in to it's environment was excellent too.

Obviously we tested the boards with a game of Bolt Action, and decided on 750 points.  I'd picked a themed list of a defensive detachment, centred around an anti tank gun and an anti aircraft system, which I elected to place in reserve.  Just as well really.

The British, in game, have a lot - I mean a LOT - of artillery.  And so George started the game by blowing the crap out of my Germans.

Everyone having taken a couple of pin markers, we attempted to weather the storm...

The British advanced and unleashed yet further artillery.  For my part this left me with half my force, including my own Artillery observer and my sniper completely out of action.

Thankfully my flak gun arrived and started rattling 20mm rounds into hapless British infantry units.

Whilst on the opposite flank, the one German infantry squad to avoid the tender mercies of the British 25 Pounders, kept the rest of the Brits at arms reach.

Still with most of my troops wore down by artillery, it was proving an uphill struggle to keep the Tommies at bay, not helped by their running a PIAT team forward to destroy my Flak gun.

The British now held one of the three objectives and were close to contesting another.

This forced me in to relatively petty reprisals.  Turning my Pak 40 first onto the British Bren gun carrier, and then onto the infantry, with a handful of HE rounds someone had provided for us.

Why not the Humber armoured car?  Well sadly, a flaw in the Recce rules means that any time you turned a gun on the Humber it could simply hide behind a nearby building, for free.  It was just pointless to shoot at it, so I didn't bother.  That rule is irrefutably broken.

As was my force by the end of the game.  With a steady battering of fire my troops were just incapable of offering resistance.  A Pak 40 and a dozen infantry slunk away.

An enjoyable game, but due to the artillery, very much a one sided battle.  As I've already said this month, Bolt Action is an imperfect beast.  But George's terrain is excellent!