Something A Bit Different: Andrew Batchford’s Bolt Action Belgians

MV – One of the great joys of working for a wargames company is that pretty much all of your colleagues are working on a new project most of the time, so there’s a constant stream of awesome models on show all around the office. Today I’ve grabbed Andrew Batchford from our Customer Service team to chat about his latest Bolt Action project – Belgians!

AB – It all started with a robust discussion (that’s a very diplomatic way of describing an argument! –ed.) among the Customer Service team about Belgians in Bolt Action, with one opinion voiced that they are far too similar to a French army on the tabletop. Outraged, I was on a mission to prove them wrong, and before I knew it I was deep into the history books! The more I learned about the Belgian Army in the Second World War, the more determined I was to get this force on the table. Far from being “48 hours and done”, the Belgian Army was a fascinating force with an interesting developmental history, particularly in the field of armoured vehicles. It was also a force built up out of desperate necessity, as there were fears that it would have to stand alone against Germany.

On the tabletop, the Belgians are completely different from any other Bolt Action army I’ve played. Being an early-war force, they don’t have anything in the way of heavy armour or really big guns. What they do have, however, is a lot of cheap, Inexperienced units, as well as a few really cool and unique ones. This means that, rather than the small, tough, mostly Veteran armies I usually field, I suddenly had a lot of order dice on my hands! One of the most interesting units in the Belgian army list are the Grenadiers, capable of fielding up to three light mortars in a single squad! You can only have one of these squads per platoon, but at 1,750 points and two platoons, this army can put out a serious number of small HE templates – or smokescreens, which always surprise people! Being as there’s not any single massively powerful tank or gun in this list, it’s very much a case of ‘firepower by committee’. Luckily, I’ve got lots of units to form that committee, including my plucky little Renault FT ‘tanks’!

1st Platoon

944pts, 8 Order Dice

2nd Platoon

*Forward Artillery Doctrine

1,745pts, 17 Order Dice

I’ve got the first couple of games under my belt with this force and found it to be a really interesting one to play. The big upside is the sheer number of bodies and order dice on hand combined with the massed light mortar fire of the Grenadiers. The Chasseurs Ardennais provide me with a tough Veteran unit that can be relied upon to take and hold objectives or launch a close-range assault, while the Renault FTs are surprisingly effective mobile (well, sort of mobile) machine gun bunkers. On the downside, all that indirect fire has a minimum range, so this list can struggle against really aggressive opponents who can get in close and start picking off those vulnerable Inexperienced units. So far, I’ve found that something of a First World War approach can work well for me, with my infantry advancing behind a barrage of smoke shells, but I’ve learned that I need to keep my forces together – leaving units on their own or splitting my troops up too much is a surefire way to get defeated piecemeal!

I’ve been able to use a simple ‘conveyor-belt’ approach to batch-painting the infantry. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just a nice simple layer/wash/highlight process! All in all, the entire 1,750 points took me about two months, which is pretty good going for me. I’ve put all of my Grenadiers in sidecaps to distinguish them from the regular infantry, and I’m looking at challenging myself to kitbash and convert a few of the more ‘experimental’ Belgian armoured vehicles in the future. Going forward, I’m also planning to add some Force Publique (a semi-uniformed militia force which I’ll probably make using the extensive Partisan range), and perhaps some French or British Expeditionary Force allies to get that real early-war feeling – either way, this army isn’t done by a long shot!

Collecting Belgians

Start your own Belgian army with these key units:

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