Bolt Action Test Game #4

All,

My plan was to move on to another set of rules to test them out (more on that in a later post, of course), but with as much fun as Danny and I had with the Bolt Action game in the Philippines, and the fact Nik missed it, I decided to do another Bolt Action fight.  The big lesson from last game was to introduce more LOS-blocking terrain onto the table; this order I faithfully carried out, adding quite a bit of LOS-blocking terrain, then promptly placed in primarily on the perimeter of the table, leaving the center of the table as a bit of shooting gallery, once again, or, more accurately, a fishbowl, since I put LOS-blocking hills in three of the four corners of the table, from which there were some great fields of fire...

In any case, I wanted to head to the Eastern Front, so here we are in July 1941, Operation Barbarossa still in its infancy.  Since Danny was here last game, I let him pick; he went with the attacker, in this case the Germans, while Nikki took Soviet defenders.  So, a nice little game of Nazis vs Bolshevists, hoping they can both lose ;)

Overview, north is up.  We've got a river in the center running north-south; once again it is passable (bad going) for infantry but impassable for vehicles, which will have to use the bridge.  There are hills in the northwest (top left), southwest (bottom left), and northeast (top right), with a small village at right center bottom, with some sturdy (hard cover) wooden buildings, though the wooden walls around them are much flimsier (soft cover).  There are stands of trees that block LOS, and then individual/pairs of trees dotting the landscape that do not block LOS but obscure the target (making it harder to hit).  The Russkies also have an entrenchment in the north, on the east side of the river (top center right).

Looking east from the German baseline.

Looking west from the Soviet baseline.

A closer look at the NW hill.

The SW hill.

And the NE hill (a bit hard to see the elevation, but the entrenchment is actually on the hill as well).

A closeup of the village.

The German attackers:
-Command Team
-MG-34 team
-8.0cm mortar team
-5.0cm mortar team
-Flamethrower team
-Three 8-man rifle squads
-Two Stug IIIDs (short 75mm gun)

The Soviet defenders:

-Command Team

-2 x M1937 45mm ATGs

-2 50mm mortar teams

-2 PTRD 14.5mm ATRs

-2 Maxim .30-cal MG teams

-4 8-man rifle squads (each squad is assumed to have Molotov-cocktails to use if/when they close-assault German armor)

So, you see this is another 'test game,' and it's the first one where I felt like I really screwed up.  Yep, lessons were learned here.  Here are my screw-ups:

1) As previously mentioned, I left the center of the battlefield as a fish bowl, long fields of fire, never a good thing for encouraging maneuver;

2) I gave one side armor and the other plentiful non-armored anti-tank capability.  I could see it was quite deflating for the defender to not have any armor, it simply takes away from the fun, and the attacker having two AFVs but facing two ATGs, two ATRs, and four rifle squads with Molotov cocktails was, again, not a recipe to encourage maneuver;

3) I didn't create a 'DMZ' between the opposing deployment zones, which led to some action right off the bat but didn't lend themselves to the best tactical employment/deployment, so a little excitement that only served to weaken each side; and

4) Most egregiously, I decided to try going opposite ends of the spectrum on troop quality.  Yep, I made the Germans veteran troops (Morale 10, modifier making it harder to kill them as well) and the Soviets raw troops (Morale 8, modifier making it easier to kill them as well).  Let me just forewarn you, 'raw' troops are absolute garbage; we all agreed to bump the Russkies up to 'Regular' troops at the end of Turn 1.  We shan't be using 'raw' troops again, unless it's one to three units of a much larger force, but absolutely not making a whole force 'raw.'

So, lessons learned.  There's one more thing, not really something I screwed up, but just an observation/realization I came to playing wargames with 11 and 16-year old boys: I need to play more 'gamey' games.  I think there's still room for the traditional attack-defense games, but I need to keep the games with largely equal forces, largely equal troop quality, and some armor on both sides (or none, but who the heck is going to play a WWII game with kids with no armor!!!???), I need to block the center up more with terrain (to encourage maneuver), and mostly they need to be 'meeting engagements,' i.e., go out there and whack the other side, last man standing-type of fights.

Overview, now with troops on the table.  The left-hand third of the table was reserved for the Germans, and the Soviets were able to deploy anywhere else on the table (the right-hand two-thirds).  So if you look at the left side of the board, there's a little stone ruin at left top center and another at bottom center left; the dividing line ran from the left side of the top ruin to the right side of the bottom ruin.  I made the attacker (Germans) set up first, then allowed the defenders (Soviets) to set up.  

Each side could deploy or keep in reserve as many units at they wished; the Germans threw their entire force on the table (I told Danny I would have left the Stugs off the table until I saw where the Russian AT assets were), while the Soviets put everything on the table except one rifle squad in reserve (which Nik never did bring on the table, despite several reminders from me).

The German deployment in the northwest: Stug #1 (bottom left), their 80mm mortar (far left), their Command Team (just right of the mortar, in the trees), the Flamethrower team (top center, in the trees), 1st Squad (top center), 2nd Squad (center), and 3rd Squad (bottom right).

The German deployment in the southwest: Stug #2 (far left, with Stug #1 above it), the 50mm mortar team (bottom left), and the MG-34 MG team (bottom right).

Soviet deployment in the village: Nik knows the ATRs are going to have a hard time with the Stugs, need to be close and need to get on the flank/rear, so he sort of set them up in defilading positions (right center and left center, behind the houses), with MG#2 in the top house and 2nd Rifle Squad on the bottom left house.

Further back, he's got one of the ATGs dug-in on the road (far right) and the other sitting behind a hedge in a field (center bottom).  The Command Team is behind the third house (left), while 50mm mortar #2 is behind the trees (far right, just above the ATG on the road).

Up on the NE hill, 1st Rifle Squad is in the trench (far left), MG #1 is in the ruins (far right), and 50mm mortar #1 is behind the trees at top center right.

And then, over on the German-held SW hill, the Soviet commander has pushed 3rd Rifle Squad right up against the German MG-34 team's deployment area.

The Soviet 4th Rifle Squad is in reserve, off table.

So, we're going to start with some excitement straight out the gate, and it all comes down to reaching into the bag of Bolt Action orders dice to see if the first dice pulled will be a Soviet dice or a German dice...

And it's a Russkie dice!  The Reds let out a 'Urrah!" and charge straight into the German machine gun position!!!

It takes two rounds of combat, but each side loses three men in the ensuing melee, which brings the Soviet rifle squad down to five men, but puts the three-man German MG team out of the fight.

The next dice out of the bag is a German one, so the veteran grenadiers of the German 3rd Squad (bottom left) promptly train their weapons on the newly acquired Soviet position (top right) and open fire...

Two of the Commies are hit, taking the squad below 50% and, being Raw, they promptly fail their morale test and flee the battlefield...

Then the Germans open up with both mortars and one of the Stugs on the Soviet-occupied NE hill...

And promptly eliminate the Soviet MG #1.

Soviet light mortars ('potato throwers') rain down in the center and the ATGs take their shots at Stug #1 (left, above the road), but hits are seldom and the Nazis are largely content to sit back and pound the Soviet defenses with their mortars and Stugs.

The Stugs trade fire with the Soviet ATGs (top right) for a bit, then Danny comes to the realization (much as I did) that those little ATGs don't pose much of a threat right now, so he just starts laying into the trench and the two frontline wooden houses (center and bottom right).

The Germans finally get moving forward, egged on by their Battalion Commander (Papa), but Soviet mortars and small arms immediately begin taking a toll, wiping out 3rd Squad (you can see some markers at bottom right) and putting a hurtin' on 2nd Squad (top center).  

Danny was smart, should have just sat back and stayed kinetic, no reason to push forward and take casualties...

The heroes of the game make their move: the German flamethrower team moves up to the riverbank, with 1st Squad (far left) laying down covering fire.

Where Danny figures out that the dummy that set up the table didn't put the river far enough away from the Soviet defensive positions, that the flamethrower could operate at the very end of its reach and take the Russkie positions under fire!  The Flamethrower team begins squirting jellied gasoline into the Soviet trench, emptying that bad boy out (only a couple casualties, but enough Pins to run them off)!

Stug #1 moves up and gets 'clanged' by the 45mm guns, putting some pins on it, while Stug #2 sits tight (far left) and continues pounding the village (just visible at far right).

One of the ATRs (center left, outside the house, with 2nd Squad in it) and the 45mm ATG (on the road) are starting to suffer under the Stugs' fire.

The Russian 2nd Squad (bottom right) fires on the German Flamethrower team (top left), but somehow only takes out two of them, leaving the third, who passes his morale test!

Stug #1 has rallied and pushes up into the village, practically sticks his stubby little 75mm barrel into the southern-most house and blasts the Soviet MG Team #2 to Kingdom Come!  The Soviet ATRs, now at point-blank range (far right and just off camera to top center), BOTH MISS!

The sole survivor of the German Flamethrower team stands alone against Soviet small arms fire, as well as HE rounds from BOTH Soviet 50mm mortars!  The German commander has moved up to lend moral support (left, in the ruins) ;)

And then the Nazi flamethrower operator lays into the Red 2nd Squad in the house, causing them some casualties but they're still hanging in there.

Stug #1 blasts the Soviet ATR #2 off the face of the earth (you can see the explosion at the top right corner of the bottom left house).

ATR #1 (top right) finally hits the Stug, but it ricochets away harmlessly, as the Commies in the house return fire on the flamethrower man...

I talked to Nik about his use of the Soviet rifle squad in the house, I was curious if he'd given any thought about charging the Stug to knock it out with the Molotov cocktails.  He said he had but didn't do it because he figured he'd have failed the morale roll to charge into close combat.  Technically speaking it should have taken him two activations to do it because of the wood fence, but I probably would have let him get away with it anyway.  Fortune favors the bold!  ;)

Finally killing him.  But Stug #2 promptly rolls up (bottom left) and blasts the Soviets out of the house, while Stug #1 eliminates ATR 1#1, at which point the Soviets throw in the towel (despite never having committed their 4th Rifle Squad).

Not sure it would have won them the game, but bringing their 4th Squad on certainly couldn't have hurt the Soviets' chances of winning; I certainly would have brought them on.  So it was kind of an uneven game due to all the screwups I've already talked about, but the boys still had a decent time overall.  In the middle of the game it was actually quite a close-run thing, really could have gone either way as the Germans' "sit back and pound them" approach wasn't working on the buildings in the village, the Soviet troops there were taking very few casualties, the Germans were going to have to go in there and dig them out (or flame them out, or blast them out with Stugs at point-blank range).  It was really the flamethrower moving up and clearing the trench that flipped the game to the Germans, and I couldn't help but think the Soviets should have brought 4th Squad in atop the hill, into the ruins above the trench, and mowed the flamethrower team down before they went and worked over 2nd Squad in the village.  The Germans were very low on infantry, with only 1st Squad still alive (and basically hiding out in their starting positions), but once the flamethrower cleared the trench and worked over the Red rifle squad in the village the fight was all over but the yelling, even though it drug on for another couple turns, which was the sour point for Nik, and where I really felt like I should have given him some armor to come on from reserve.

So, an okay fight, but always a great time when I can get up in the toy room and spend some time with my boys.  I hope you liked it, and there's more fights to come, but the next one's not Bolt Action, got some other stuff going on.  A few games actually, we'll see what I get written up first.

V/R,
Jack