Nut and BOLTs

Evening All,

This week I have mainly been playing Bolt Action, thinking about Bolt Action variants and playing what we thought was a Bolt Action variant.....but isn't!!

Tuesday night down at Enfield Gamers myself and Ian got in a game of BA with my Commandos taking on his French at the Top Secret scenario. Taking on a more numerous opponent with a pair of artillery pieces, armoured car and light tank was something a bit new so I concentrated on going after the objective.
 Keeping back the carriers for a couple of turns I was forced to make a flanking run with them by Turn 3 but did pretty well with them. Even though they got tonked eventually they let Ponsonby-Smyth almost make off with the objective only to get sniped at which point Spatchcock grabbed it and ran. Rolling for the 7th turn he didn't quite get the chance to make it away but very close.

To represent the objective we used a Cthulu dice and quickly decided that it was the Necronomicon! This set me to thinking about how easy it would be to twist BA to Wierd War II. Flicking the net the other day I stumbled across a blog detailing a BA version of the Red Skull so pretty easily would be the answer.......interesting!! Possibly a refocus for St Peytersburg??

Moving on, myself and Rich have been trying out the Alpha ruleset for Gates of Anatares. It's taken a few games to start getting a grip on how the game is and more importantly what it isn't. Despite various rumours it's not a return to early versions of 40K and more pertinently it's REALLY not BA re-skinned!

Other than sharing the Order Dice and Pin system a lot of the core mechanics are substantially different.
As an example being in area cover doesn't make it harder to hit the target but makes them more difficult to kill, i.e gives a cover save bolted on top of "toughness" and armour (resilience+armour+cover).
The effect is that you can still hit, and crucially pin, with less chance of a kill aka suppression of the target.

It took me a while to catch on to this whilst also dealing with a D10 system, drones and exotic equipment all within an Alpha ruleset. For a while I was thinking that it was a simple mechanic made fiddly but that was to misunderstand.
The other thing to GoA shares with BA is the necessity to use proper tactics and make co-ordinated use of your force!

Same again Tuesday night!