D-Day Replayed, a Narrative Bolt Action Campaign

Article courtesy of Grant Crockett, one of the four volunteer organisers of D-Day Replayed.

D-Day Replayed aims to re-tell small stories from the largest amphibious assault ever known, and the days that followed, through the medium of Bolt Action.

Operation Overlord takes place over two days and five games at the single platoon level. By taking part, you will command your forces as one of 40 players battling across 20 tables. Operation Overlord will play out on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th of June 2024.

The Big Drop takes place the night before Operation Overlord begins. Just hours before the beach landings! The outcome of these parachute drops will influence the first game of Overlord on Saturday 8th June.

This narrative campaign has consequences. Your view of the war extends only as far as the next 500 yards of advance. Your victories or defeats will reverberate far beyond the range of your binoculars (and your tabletop).

At any one time, we’ll see as much as 480 ft² of tabletop being fought over, with the potential for as many as 40,000 points of Axis and Allied forces deployed. We are supporting Waterloo Uncovered, the groundbreaking charity combining world-class archaeology with veteran care and recovery.

Origins

Like many such projects, D-Day Replayed started life as a chat in a pub. We had been massively impressed by the scale and spectacle of Waterloo Replayed in 2019, which recreated the iconic Napoleonic showdown on a grand scale at Glasgow University. It felt right to do the same for D-Day. We hadn’t considered the difference in scale of land at this point…

Waterloo Replayed was the brainchild of Prof. Tony Pollard, head of battlefield archaeology at Glasgow University. We had collaborated with Tony in 2013-14 on an Atlantic Walls project for the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Stewart, meanwhile, was behind the ‘Replayed’ brand and design work for The Great Game: Waterloo Replayed after that.

With Tony’s blessing, we began planning (over many more pints) in 2022 and dusted off the “Replayed” moniker in 2023.

Our Cause

Tony was only too happy for us to take over and develop the brand on the condition we continued to raise money for a veterans’ charity. We jumped at the chance to support and partnered with the charity that started it all.

Waterloo Uncovered is in many respects a unique veterans charity. Since 2015 it has combined world-class archaeology with a support programme for veterans and the military community. It aims to bring peace and enrichment to veterans through the understanding of war and its impact on people.

A Commemorative Campaign

When it came to designing our weekend we knew we couldn’t recreate D-Day on the tabletop in quite the same way that Waterloo had been a few years ago. We would need an aircraft hangar for that!

It was important to us that we try to fit together the complex mosaic of individual battles that made up the bigger picture in June 1944. This meant carefully curating scenarios and lists from the most appropriate Bolt Action campaign books and encouraging players to lean into the historical aspect of the game through certain custom rules.

Since we wouldn’t be able to replay the whole battle on a single table, we sank our efforts into playing small stories, or vignettes that would make up the larger narrative. We wanted to put our players in the boots of the most junior officers on the battlefield and give each decision they would make some weight.

Games With Consequences

As luck would have it, a hugely experienced Tournament Organiser lives in our hometown! Alistair Unicomb is a veteran T.O. and contributes greatly to the competitive Bolt Action scene in Scotland. He runs his own event, Megatron3000, every August and is a regular feature in the competitive tournament scene. We are really lucky to have him as a member of the D-Day Replayed team.

Together, we’ve set about trying to create something unique for the Bolt Action calendar.

All of the Replayed games will be linked, from Friday’s ‘Big Drop’ to the end of ‘Operation Overlord’ on Sunday. From one battle to the next overall team performance will generate buffs and debuffs that will need to be appropriately distributed amongst the teams.

We wanted to include something to replicate the shifting challenges and priorities that might have faced both sides. Whilst your opponent might be facing a handicap, it’s entirely possible that you are too—just in a different area of the battle space.

As the games progress both sides will generate campaign points that will total up to a final tally – spelling out victory or defeat at the end of the weekend. And for our kind of campaign weekend it’s worth noting there might be various flavours of victory or defeat on offer!

Only the players, the lowly 2nd Lieutenants, can decide when to be daring or when to be cautious. They don’t know it yet, but the outcome of this campaign hangs in the balance. And everything could be riding on this next roll of the dice.

There will also be four individual special missions that will lend extra narrative heft to the outcome of our campaign. Here we plan to rotate players out of their rank-and-file games for a single match and give them a special mission. These missions will be scenarios not often seen on the competitive circuit – so should feel fresh to even the most veteran Bolt Action player.

What to Expect?

This event is about remembering what was and asking what if. Victory or defeat won’t rest on the shoulders of one individual officer. D-Day Replayed is about team results.

As such, this event will be a friendly one rather than hyper-competitive. We welcome new and experienced Bolt Action players, though for newbies we suggest you get some ‘basic training’ at Common Ground Games (in Stirling) beforehand!

The Community

We’ve been thrilled by the enthusiasm and help offered by the entire wargames community. From individuals, games clubs and companies like Warlord Games. With an event like this, the old cliché couldn’t be more true. We couldn’t do this without such passionate support and encouragement from you all.

And we can’t wait to get together in June!