Tournament Tales – Brothers in Arms Event Report

Working in wargaming can be a double-edged sword at times. While the benefits are many and obvious, one thing I find is that I never get time to play as many games – particularly tournament games – as I’d like. I know, I know, it’s a hard life, but you can put your tiny violins away now, because last weekend I did manage to get to a tournament – our HQ Store’s excellent Brothers in Arms Bolt Action doubles event. Let me tell you all about it!

As always, Marcus was ‘too busy playing’ to remember to take any pictures – handily, Conor H was able to get some snaps of the tournament while he was TO’ing, and we dragged Marcus’ army into the photo booth for some shots. – ed.

The Details:

Brothers in Arms was a 1,600 point doubles event – each player bringing a legal 800 point force, with a limit of 8 Order Dice per player. Naturally, they also needed a partner! I found mine in the form of the irrepressible Colin Swinburne, one of the regulars at the HQ store’s Wednesday gaming nights, and a fellow member of the Nottingham Casuals Wargaming Club. Colin has a reputation for painting gorgeous armies, building excellent scenic bases, and being a very aggressive Bolt Action player, so I was keen to snaffle him as my partner before someone else from the club did! 

A couple of months out from the event, we bandied around various list ideas, from the sublime to the ridiculous (a Maus was very much in the picture for a couple of weeks), before settling on a comfortable combination. Colin would bring his Chindits, his ‘main’ army and the one he’d taken to the Bolt Action GT in August, while I threw it back to my first ever BA force – 1945 Germans! For me, a trio of Panzer IVHs provided the firepower and most of my points, while my infantry were rather dubious – five Volkssturm, five Green Grenadiers, a Regular AT Rifle team (represented by two chaps with panzerfausts for the late-war theme), and an Inex. Platoon Commander. Colin, meanwhile, brought two Chindit sections, an Airlanding Rifle Section, and an AT rifle to accompany his M3 and Humber.

You can see some ‘beauty shots’ of my army below, and we’ll try to prise Colin’s models off him for the same treatment soon!

We both have plenty of experience with these armies and list concepts, and crucially I already had all the models I needed painted up and ready! They aren’t the most highly optimised lists we could have put together, because this was a slightly more ‘relaxed’ event, but they were still put together with a core vision in mind. Very simply, Colin would bring the bulk of the infantry, I’d bring the bulk of the armour! This meant that we would be able to play to our strengths, with Colin manoeuvring aggressively with his Veterans, while my Panzers took the fight to the enemy armour and my (frankly pretty pathetic) infantry contingent held onto objectives and acted as an emergency reserve. That was the plan, at least…

The Games:

The day of days dawned, and I embarked on a great voyage (okay, my daily fifteen minutes down the A52) to the appointed battleground (my workplace). Playing events at HQ has the great advantage of all of my models, rulebooks, and gaming widgets being in the building already, making it much harder to forget something important. The TO team of Conor Hind and Kieran Leishman had done a sterling job of converting the store, foyer, and mail order picking floor into our arena, with some fantastic table set-ups. With 24 players packed in, it was time to kick off!

Game 1:

Our first game was against James and Robert Stamp, who’d brought a whole bunch of Japanese infantry, light armour, and heavy mortars to the party. The mission was nice and simple – Seek & Destroy, with Quarters and Meeting Engagement as the deployment conditions, and an interesting twist in the secondaries – points were awarded for killing officers and armoured vehicles!

I often find that Seek & Destroy can swing one of two ways – absolute nail-biters, or one-sided walkovers. This one initially looked like it was going to be the latter, with some big early kills for us, but then we got a bit complacent! Up a couple of kills going into the middle portion of the game, we relaxed the pressure (aided by the fact that neither side seemed able to fail a cover save), and James and Robert took advantage, fighting back hard and seizing the initiative. They very nearly managed to take the game away from us completely, and we were forced into a desperate defensive scramble to grind out an exhausting but satisfying draw.

Game 2:

Having drawn the first game, we felt sure we’d dropped any chance of placing at the top end of the standings, and in hindsight this probably meant we played our second game much more freely. We matched up against Martin Fairweather and James Leahy, who’d brought a pair of German lists – one early-war SS, packed with Veterans and light armour, and one Afrika Korps, including a rather concerning Flak 88.

The mission was one of my favourites in all of Bolt Action – Key Positions, with 5 objectives, using Long Table Edges and Prepared Positions. We had some good luck right off the bat, winning the roll to place the objectives, and this meant we had a 3-2 advantage in objective control from the end of turn 1. This meant that James and Martin were forced to go on the attack immediately, when their Veterans would probably have been more comfortable defending, and played into our lists’ strengths.

Our opponents came on gamely, but our heavier armour took a toll early on, with both Colin’s M3 and my Panzers scoring kills. Colin mounted an aggressive defence, letting the enemy infantry get into no-man’s-land before launching his Chindits out to engage at close range, while my armour continued to lay down supporting fire and stop the smaller tanks from getting involved to support their troops. One Panzer IV, however, decided to be… differently useful.

I’d sent one of my tanks on Outflank, with the intention of rolling onto the board right next to the 88 and blasting it to pieces at point-blank range. The first part of this plan went swimmingly, but the blasting part not so much. Having failed to kill the 88, my tank was a sitting duck for the next turn… until James decided he didn’t want to roll any hits either, which was sporting of him. This continued right until the end of the game, at which point the big gun finally removed the offending vehicle, which had served its purpose – albeit not in the way I’d planned!

Unfortunately for Martin and James, our defensive positions were simply too strong, and we were able to cut their troops down before they could get to our objectives. It was a valiant effort given the circumstances, but Colin and I were well satisfied with the win. At least we knew we wouldn’t be going home empty-handed.

Game 3:

Our final game turned out to be an absolute barn-burner, by turns one of the most frustrating, triumphant, and ultimately fun games of Bolt Action I’ve ever played. The mission was Top Secret, with Quarters and Meeting Engagement deployment, and we were up against Jason Cotteril-Attaway and Tim Grieves. They’d brought a rather nasty one-two punch of a Soviet infantry horde backed up by German veterans and a mighty Tiger I – for the first time all day, my Panzers felt outgunned!

Colin took one look at the board, and declared that he had a Plan. I decided to follow his lead, which was almost certainly my best tactical decision of the tournament. The plan in question was brutally simple – Colin’s Chindits would rush to grab the central objective, using Fieldcraft to Run through heavy cover. The rest of our combined forces were to be sacrificed to the mission – their only purpose was to draw fire away from the Chindits, or even get between them and the enemy to give them more cover.

The plan got off to a great start. Jason had cunningly infiltrated a unit of Spähtruppen as close as possible to the objective, looking set to take control of it in Turn 2. However, one of my Panzer IVs rolled onto the board, lined up both its machine guns, and caught them out of cover – scratch one Spähtruppen squad! Meanwhile, Colin’s ultra-aggressive thrust towards the objective was paying dividends, and we soon found ourselves in possession of the objective. All we needed to do was get that one Chindit squad off the table…

At this stage, if one of our dice came out of the bag inside the first three or four, we were home free. Colin’s Chindits would sprint back behind hard cover, out of line of sight and poised to get off the table, while my Panzers and infantry would surge forward and throw themselves on the enemy guns in a delaying action. Everything was in place. The dice bag then proceeded to remind us why it’s the final arbitrator of Bolt Action dreams. Even with a relatively even number of dice in the bag, we didn’t get an Order Die for the first eight activations. This gave Chris time to surge forward with his infantry, while Jason whittled away at the Chindits at range.

In only a few minutes, the initial plan had gone out of the window, and a savage point-blank firefight had developed in the centre of the table. Elsewhere, one of my Panzers was burning, having lost its rather unequal fight with Jason’s Tiger, and while our sacrificial units were doing their job, we were starting to run out of Order Dice. A failed test saw the Chindits pinned down on the objective for another turn, and things were looking bleak. My blood pressure wasn’t improved by our clubmate Himmy popping in to inform us that he’d just lost his last game. A quick bit of mental arithmetic told me that meant we would be looking at a top three finish – if we could win this game.

At last, Colin (who’d held his nerve with ice in his veins all game long, while I oscillated wildly between despair and joy) was able to get his Chindits moving with the objective, although Chris’ Soviets had given them an absolute pasting and there were only a couple left. As turn 5 wound down, long-range shooting finally destroyed the squad, but my anti-tank rifle team – one of the only infantry units we had left – dived onto the objective and into cover. The stage was set; as soon as they got their Order Die in turn 6, they would be able to run off the board, and seal the win. If our bag luck continued, though, there was a very good chance Chris and Jason would be able to ‘table’ us, as we were running out of models!

Right at the death, the Dice Gods decided to smile on us. Incoming fire at the top of turn 6 reduced my AT rifle team to one man, but he passed his morale check with nerves of steel. When his die came out of the bag, it all came down to one Order check – 8 or less on 2d6. Luckily, my model wasn’t as nervous as I was, and passed with flying colours. That clinched the game, and what a game it was! 

Aftermath:

With the games wrapped up and my heart rate returning to normal, it was time for the prizegiving. I was happy to see James and Robert from our first game go home with a well-deserved Best Sportsmen, and then it was on to the placings. Astonishingly, our last win had catapulted us right up to the top, and, thanks to secondaries, we’d come first! We’d only gone and done it! 

While winning a tournament is always nice, the real victory is always having a cracking day out, pushing toy soldiers around a table with likeminded people. Bolt Action is great for both competitive and historically themed games, and it’s such a simple core system that you can get yourself ‘event ready’ with just a few practice matches.