Finest Brie: Playing French in Competitive Bolt Action

Ahhh, the French. An oft-underappreciated army that actually sees a surprising amount of love in the cut-and-thrust of tournament play. With the new plastic infantry boxed set out now, we anticipate plenty more of you picking up a French force, and naturally some of you will want to get some tournament gaming in – but where to start? Fear not! I’m here to chat through some of your powerful options, and show how I’d take the French to a no-holds-barred tournament. En Avant!

Before we begin, we’ll establish some ground rules for our hypothetical tournament. I’m using the ruleset from the World Open War International Team Tournament 2023, so it’ll be a Generic Reinforced Platoon at 1,100 points, with a maximum of 24 Order Dice – plenty to play with there! Let’s look at how the list shakes out, talk through how it works, and then examine some other options – after all, this is by no means an exhaustive guide!

Armies of France – Generic Reinforced Platoon:  

1,100pts, 24 Order Dice

So that is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of Frenchmen! This is a pretty classic French ‘horde’ army, built to both maximise ‘bag control’ (simply having so many more order dice than your opponent that you minimise the randomness of the dice draw and thus can impose your will on them with greater ease!), and get the most out of the French national special rules. With the free Medium Howitzer and Inexperienced Infantry Squad, there’s functionally an extra 149 points of troops on the table and two free Order Dice, making this in actuality a 1,249 point army – isn’t free stuff great?!

While this is quite a ‘standard’ French competitive list (loads of units, a pair of medium howitzers, all that good stuff), I’ve added a few personal ‘wrinkles’ in here which may seem a little unusual. Allow me to explain! The TCC Tank Hunter is an interesting beast, essentially a rear-facing medium AT gun on the back of a soft-skin truck. It’s certainly not the most efficient AT in the world, but I was really keen to ensure that I managed to get both the brace of medium howitzers and some form of dedicated anti-tank gun in the list, rather than having to rely on the solitary flamethrower to do my tank busting. As a soft-skin, I know it can expect to see a lot of small arms fire chucked its way, so I opted to use some spare points to bump it up to Veteran to ensure that (assuming it can stay alive), it should activate when I really need it!

There’s also something of a vogue at the moment to run Medium Mortars as Inexperienced with no Spotter, and just try to chuck a six at a different unit you can see each turn – I don’t personally buy into this, and actually like to have as many forward deploying units as possible in order to control where my opponent can put their own forward deployers, so in it goes at Regular. The big Cavalry section is also something of a risk, but I really like them for their ability to hit hard and fast when needed, and they give me some much-needed stiffening (along with the Engineers) to what is otherwise quite a fragile (if very, very numerous!) infantry core.

Overall, this is an army that dominates primarily using bag and table control, combined with a reasonable amount of mid-range machine-gun shooting, and plenty of useful HE. If I can use the massive number of order dice to help ensure the first four or five dice out of the bag are mine, I can start putting down pins or dealing with enemy threats before my opponent can react, and with so many units, wherever my opponent tries to go, I’ll be there! In missions like Sectors or Envelopment/Double Envelopment the sheer number of units makes this an absolute nightmare to deal with, although it is quite vulnerable in missions decided on kill points as there are plenty of units that are quite easy to deal with. Overall, I’d say this list favours a ‘swarming’, attacking playstyle, overwhelming the enemy in individual areas with weight of numbers and attacks – while individual units may not be particularly threatening, there are simply so many of them that eventually the dice will even out in my favour – at least, that’s the theory!

Building this list is actually relatively simple – you just need loads of Frenchmen! Thankfully, the new plastic boxed set makes this easier than ever to achieve (including the Engineers!), providing loads of bodies for a great value.

We’ve also got two standout ways of beginning a new Bolt Action French Army collection:

View in store

View in Store

What’s your recipe for competitive French? Sound off with your own devilish nastiness in the comments!