Bolt Action Rules - Question to Play Testers (or Authors!)

[NJB]

Hi Chaps,

Having read the write up in WI these new rules have really sparked my interest. Now I know it's early days and that more info will be forthcoming but I wondered if you can answer a couple of questions, please?

- Will the game cope with a full company per side plus supports?
- How does morale work and what effect do more senior NCO's/Officers have?
- Is there any mechanism for hidden deployment or movement?
- could it be played with multi-figure bases?

Many thanks for any help.

Cheers

Nick

[Undave]

Without giving away any of the mechanics I'll try and answer a few.

The army lists so far are geared more towards platoon level forces so 30 odd men plus support elements in a normal sized game. If you expanded your points limit you could have as much as you want on the table but it might take you a long time to play a game.

The morale mechanics are a large part of the game and officers help with them but I'm not going to say much more than that I'm afraid.

You can easily play with multi figure bases and you kind of need to with things like team served weapons in any case. There are no area effect templates so you don't need to worry too much about spacings like you would for 40k for instance.

Hopefully that answers some of what you wanted to know without saying anything I shouldn't.

[canadasteve]

Agree with Undave except the multi-base thing. As you need to make use of cover then units on a base wouldnt make it so easy to take advantage of the cover. Also you must have unit cohesion of not more than 1" between figures, same as 40k.

[Undave]

Yeah larger multibases can be a bit awkward when it comes to cover. The guy I was playing against last week has his flammenwerfer teams on 40mm bases and it caused a bit of bother when trying to work out how much cover they were in. You can do it but do so at your own risk. Personally I'd only use multibases for weapon teams and have the squadies based singly as it makes sorting out casualties easier too. Of course if you're planning on adapting it to 20mm or whatever then that's a whole new kettle of fish.

[DocMartin]

I certainly can't imagine the game being as interesting with any form of multi-basing for infantry figures...... Our group use a variety of ETO-themed scenery for our encounters..... and I mean REALLY USE it! We have squads dodging in and out of ruined buildings, around walls & hedges and creeping through cornfields to give just a few examples of cover-hugging techniques which multi-basing wouldn't lend itself to! Occasionaly a couple of mm has made the difference between a trooper being safe or having a bullet through his helmet! (Which spoilt his whole day!)
I know this sounds obvious, but i've seen so many similar games played on terrain-light battlefields that they might as well have been black-powder era confrontations!

[Alan Charlesworth]

I used to really like the old SPI board game 'Sniper'. Can any of the play testers say if BA works well for this type of encounter?

For those not familiar with Sniper it was about infantry combat in built up areas where the fighting is from house to house and room to room, with lots of use of satchel charges to blow holes in walls and chucking of grenades etc.

[NJB]

Thanks for the answers Guys - most helpful.

[canadasteve]

@Alan yes I think it would work very well for a sniper style game. I used to play that game many years too.

[Alan Charlesworth]

@Alan yes I think it would work very well for a sniper style game. I used to play that game many years too.

Thanks. Now I'm looking forward to BA even more

[Vogless]

Sniper was an AWESOME game!