Bolt Tomahawks

Hi all,

So, been a busy week or two in Monkeyland.  We had houseguests for a few days, as my sister and brother in law, and my youngest nephew, came to visit.  It was great to see them, as it's been months since we've last seen them (on our trip to Ontario in the summer).  While here, Cub talked his cousin (a.k.a. Hammer) into trying a game of Bolt Action.  I think we may have another convert ;)

The larger red dice indicate objective buildings.

The game was objective based, with Cub's Americans looking to seize a couple of buildings from the Soviet defenders (piloted by Hammer, and consigliered by moi).

Cub wanted to break in some new tanks we'd picked up (thanks, Kyle!), and we ended up running some fairly unconventional forces, with each side fielding 200 points of infantry plus a couple tanks.  As defender, Hammer set up his units in the buildings where they could cover each other and a range of firing arcs, and waited for the American attack.

Soviet Sherman takes up an overwatch position, and searches for prey.

Early turns saw the initial American assault wave, and our reinforcements, come on the table, including the "Soviet" sherman, which took up a hull-down position behind one of the buildings.  Cub countered with his own tanks, and a first wave of infantry (plus his air observer).  The observer called in an air strike on it's earliest opportunity, but the call went unanswered for several turns.  He also jammed his tanks forward fairly aggressively (maybe a hold-over from his experiences with a Redeemer in 40k?), but in Bolt Action, that mostly gave Hammer some nice shots on their side armour.

American tanks charge in.

It took a couple of turns, but Cub's air strike eventually came in, and did its usual amount of insane damage.  By this point, however, the game was getting close to it's final turns, and the Americans still hadn't been able to mount a real attack on the objective buildings.

Air strikes thinned out the table a little.

In the end, even though the Yanks tore up the Soviets a fair bit, they couldn't take the buildings, and the game went to Hammer.  He seemed to have fun, as did the Cub, so who knows, maybe we've recruited another mini gamer?

PTRD, aka, the other Russian sniper unit.

In other news, I finally got around to finishing up the Mass. militia I've mentioned, on and off, for the last year or so.

Second half of the unit, plus officer.

This gives me a full unit of the militia, which is good, because they're one of the primary outfits operating on the British side in the Acadian campaign.

The drummer's a conceit, I admit, but still . . . 

They're not as crisp as some of the other work I've done in the scale, but honestly, I'm happy just to have them finished.  I have no idea why they were so difficult to muster motivation for, but now that they're finished, I'm actually quite jazzed to do something else on the project.

They're actually skirmishing Brit line, but the uniform is close enough.

The officer, I think, turned out reasonably well.

This guys gets all the fun secondary objectives.

With this lot done, I'll likely do either some Rangers (Gorham's were active throughout the region) or civilians, along with terrain - I want to dress up the 4Ground buildings, and a few weeks back, finally picked up some bigger resin buildings from Blue Moon (via last year's Blogger Secret Santa - thanks!), so I'd like to get them sorted for the table as well.

FMB