Top Secret

Friday night saw Densmol and I make a rare trip down to our LGS to play some Bolt Action. We got there a little later than planned, so there wasn’t much in the way of “good” shop terrain pieces, but we made it work and the game was fun regardless.

The mission rolled up was “Top Secret”, where an aeroplane has crashed with a briefcase containing important intel on board and our forces were sent to retrieve the case and get it off our respective table-edge in order to win the scenario. In this case, we used a severed Buddha Statue head as our “crashed aircraft”, which caused much juvenile merriment.

The 1000 point lists that we brought were the ones we’d planned (And subsequently weren’t able to) bring to the last tournament and Densmol was dead set on bringing his newly painted Tiger tank to plague my poor Soviets with it’s “Tiger Fear” rule and nasty Super-heavy Anti-tank gun! Of course we subsequently forgot to apply the “Tiger Fear” rule until turn 4… The Tiger performed rather awfully and my T34/85 tank didn’t do much better (But at least wasn’t destroyed in the first couple of turns like in it’s last two outings!).

We didn’t take many pics of the game as it took a long time and we were repeatedly interrupted by curious passers-by asking about the rules set, etc – which we were only too happy to explain and hopefully thereby recruit some new players! So here’s a handful of random pics with a small description of what was going on at the time. I ended up winning in the 7^th turn, which was a last gasp deal and much fun was had by both of us!

Shots exchanged across the table from hilltop to hilltop. I was able to put out enough suppressive fire to keep his Heer squads pinned through most of the game. In his center, right above the Buddha head is a very nasty 6-man SS  squad decked out with  assault weapons and Panzerfausts. In our last game they tore through my poor regulars, so this time I made sure to concentrate fire on them with my ZIS-3 Divisional Gun. It whittled them down to a single soldier, but he wouldn't run away.

Our most hilarious moment all evening. That big blob of troops in the middle of this picture are my Inexperienced Squad with their Commissar next to them. Their Lieutenant (To their left) had activated them with his "Snap to  Action" rule and they then rolled to see if they'd actually obey. Of course they failed their roll. In steps the Commissar with his trusty pistol to shoot one of the poor disobedient sods in the back of the head. (This is his special rule that allows them to re-roll a failed orders test.) I picked up the dice, blew on them for luck and rolled. The pic shows what the result was - double-sixes, the worst roll and considered a FUBAR! I rolled on the FUBAR Table to see just how horrible the result of this Orders test would be. Of course I roll a one, that gives control of the squad to one's enemy so that they can Friendly Fire at any unit in line of sight. One minute I had a Lieutenant and his Adjutant, the next, both were shot through by the massed fire of 11 rifle shots... 

Top right in this picture is Densmol's Tiger. It caused a lot of worry so I tried to use my own T-34 to take it out. Both tanks were equally useless though and spent the game mostly just rolling ones and twos at eachother. In the Center, my Guards Squad has shucked off it's pins from the earlier small arms duel and managed to pick up the intel from the crashed Buddha Head!

And here is the end game - The Guards Squad get picked up by it's truck transport and the truck starts to reverse back toward my lines of deployment. Densmol's Tiger rolls up and will take a shot at them, knowing that the following Turn 7 (Had the game ended on Turn 6, it would have been called a draw) would be enough time for them to escape with the intelligence case. The Tiger rumbles forward and fires it's fearsome 88 gun! A hit, the truck is destroyed and it's occupants have to make saves to survive the fiery wreck - which enough do and make the subsequent morale test, meaning that in the next turn they were able to stumble back to their own lines having earned themselves a rest and some hooch.

Sad to say that no painting was done this weekend! I did though glue together my newly purchased Warlord Games plastic M3 Stuart tank that I’ll be adding to my Soviets in Winter Whitewash. The Lend Lease Act meant that lots of older American and British tanks were sent to the USSR to help in their war effort after Hitler kicked off Operation Barbarosa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Stuart was used up until the end of the war by the Soviet army and it performed pretty well, though as with most of the Lend Lease kit, Soviet tankers far preferred their Soviet made tanks (T-34, etc). The addition of this light tank will free up points in my lists (My T34/85 takes up a large chunk of every list I’ve made thus far!) and provide a cool little armoured asset for future games.