Intelligence Report – Armies of the British Commonwealth: East Africa Command

We’re now halfway through our look at the National Special Rules found in Armies of the British Commonwealth, and continuing in alphabetical order we come to… East Africa Command! It’s gonna take a lot to drag Bolt Action players away from Australia and Canada – but this might just do it.

East Africa Command is unique among the nations found in this book, as it doesn’t represent a single country or contiguous region. Instead, it covers the troops drawn from the many British colonial possessions across the African continent, and as such has to account for a lot of different formations and fighting styles. Let’s see how it does that!

We can see right away that this is going to produce some scary forces. Pangas ensures that the vast majority of your force will be Tough Fighters, instantly opening the door for some hand-to-hand nastiness. Local Area Control and Scouts then combine to give you incredible Outflanking ability combined with a lot of Infiltrators, allowing for all sorts of board control shenanigans – or just getting up close and personal as quickly as possible.

We then have the two rules designed to cover iconic units from different parts of Africa. Desert Mounted Infantry gives you the ability to make your forces even more mobile, courtesy of camels, while Nigerian Chindits allows you to field a truly fearsome force of ultra-elite light infantry, perfect for carving their way through deep jungle, or the enemy! Packed with special rules, they’re pricey but very, very dangerous.

All this makes East Africa Command forces both powerful and completely unlike any other on the tabletop – perfect for commanders looking for something a little off the beaten track. When you add in the new units and Standard Commonwealth Units options, it gets even better. We think this is going to be a very popular army indeed… so it’s a good job we’ve got some new plastic Chindits in the works that we’ll be looking to release next year!