Bolt Action: Third Edition – Competitive Play

Bolt Action: Third Edition is almost upon us, and we’ve been fielding plenty of requests from people wanting to know what tournaments and competitive play are going to look like in this brave new world. Well, wonder no more! Let’s break down what you can expect to see from us and provide some suggestions and guidance for TOs and players!

First up, let’s look at tournament support. Our programme of supporting tournament organisers in the community has proven incredibly popular, and we remain committed to growing Bolt Action all over the world as part of this initiative! 2025 will see a brand-new Events Special Figure, and of course a revised series of prize support bundles.

A point of admin – naturally, there will be a crossover period where pre-arranged Second Edition events sit side by side with Third Edition! Until January 1^st 2025 we’ll provide support for both Second and Third Edition events, but as soon as the new year starts, we’ll only be supporting Third Edition – the future is now (well, it’s then)!

So, what will Third Edition tournaments look like? Well, as we’ve been saying for a long time, first and foremost – there is no wrong way to play Bolt Action, so long as everyone’s having fun! What this means from a practical standpoint is that if you want to run a competitive tournament with your own set of special rules, list restrictions, missions, or anything else – go nuts! We firmly believe that the fantastic organisers in the community know their local player groups and what tournaments their players want, so we give them total freedom to make those events happen!

With that being said, we equally recognise that, particularly as we’re at the dawn of the new edition, people will be looking to us for guidance and a ‘baseline’ for competitive play that they can take and build off or modify to their hearts’ content. For the early stages of Third Edition, this will also help guide players in creating new armies and adapting existing collections – it’s always nice to have a goal to aim for!

So, caveats and explanations aside, what sort of things are we looking at? We’ll start with an observation on game size from our playtesting team – made up of veteran TOs and competitive players, these stalwarts have played countless test games under a huge variety of conditions, so they really do know their stuff!

Points Limits

While a lot of playtesting has taken place at the 1,250-point mark (who doesn’t like having plenty of room to take extra goodies?), the game works perfectly well up and down the points ranges – we’ve seen good action from 750 (perfect for introductory events), all the way up through the old classic 1,000 and ‘GT Standard’ 1,100, and even as high as 1,450! All produce good, fun games, and don’t bog down too much, even with higher Order Dice counts, meaning you can be confident in running your event as big or small as you like – although above 1,500 points you’re definitely going to want to allow about three hours per game. You can also look at limiting the number of Order Dice used if you want to keep games quick – we’ve found that Armies with fewer than 20 Order Dice are good for this!

Platoon Selectors

Next up, we’ll look at platoon selectors and restrictions thereon. The new platoon selector system allows for enormous variety and freedom for players to tailor their lists exactly the way they want them – and that’s a good thing! It can also be used by a TO to create an event that encourages certain kinds of lists, and thus different experiences. Want plenty of tanks on the tables? Consider making an Armoured Platoon a mandatory choice for your event! Want to challenge your players’ list building chops? Why not limit the number of platoons that can be used! Think of these concepts as ways to guide your players towards building lists that work for the event you’re running, and you won’t go far wrong!

Scenarios

The final big element of any tournament pack is the games themselves! The new scenario generation system is great for ensuring plenty of flavour and variety in the games, but of course it’s vital that all your players at an event play the same missions to ensure fairness – we recommend pre-rolling your missions or simply picking the ones you want to run beforehand! You can choose to tell your players well in advance what they’ll be playing, to allow them time to practice, or keep it secret until the day so it’s a surprise to everyone!

Example Competitive Play Tournament Pack

That’s a lot of theory and concepts – how about a bit more of a ‘hard and fast’ sample pack? Well – here you go! This is our ‘starter for 10’ nice and simple tournament pack: take as much or as little inspiration from it as you like, and if you do use it – tell us what you think!

1,250 points
A maximum of 4 Platoons
A maximum of 18-20 Order Dice (TO’s choice!)
Missions pre-generated but kept secret until the event.
5 games over 2 days OR 3 games on a single day
2 hrs 30mins per game

…and that’s it! It really doesn’t get much simpler than that, but it achieves a couple of key objectives. Firstly, by capping at 1,250 points and 18 dice, it ensures that the games can be run in the two-and-a-half-hour timeslot, without armies becoming overly large. If you’re confident that your players will rattle through their games nice and quickly, you can go up to 20 dice to give them a bit more wiggle room! Pre-generated but secret scenarios ensure that players will have to try to take balanced lists, rather than trying to tailor them to the missions. Crucially, the Platoon limit is what really forces players to make tough, creative choices, as it ensures that if anyone wants to ‘double up’ on a particular kind of platoon, they’ll be running that and two mandatory Rifle Platoons – and nothing else! This is just an example of the kind of thing you can achieve in competitive play with a very simple set of rules and restrictions – so go forth, and compete!

Bolt Action: Third Edition – Launching 26th September!