Review : Bolt Action

We play tested Bolt Action a set of WWII skirmish rules published by Osprey and made by Warlord Games. It’s a beautiful book benefiting I think from Osprey’s library of excellent artwork as well as their very skilled publishing staff.

I very much like and appreciate that the rules and expansions for Bolt Action are available both in print as well as electronically. I have the printed rules (and recommend you get that as well). The expansions I’ve turned to electronic versions picking up the Tank, German and Russian books. Oddly tho I don’t seem to be able to get electronic versions from the Osprey web site anymore and instead had to get them via the Amazon Kindle store. O well. It works.

The core rule book gives you just enough to get started with not only the rules but a smattering of stats for Germany, US, Brits and Russia to be able to play without having to get an expansion.

I’ve been looking for a good set of WWII skirmish rules for quite awhile and frankly Bolt Action still isn’t it. Over the years we’ve tried Battalions in Crisis, Battleground, Face of Battle, Rules of Engagement and a few others.

So why does Bolt Action fall short and what good qualities does it have?

Firstly it lumps tanks and guns into categories. It really distills away the flavor and nuances of various WWII hardware. Bolt Action uses a damage value for tanks. So a soft skin truck is a damage value of 6. An armored car is a 7. Tanks like the Russian BT7 or German Pz IIc are an 8. The Pz IIIg is also an 8 but the T-34 is a 9. When you fire at such beasts, if you score a hit (it’s a d6 roll) you then use the penetration value to add to a d6 roll. So the Pz IIIg for instance has a medium AT gun and adds 5 to the roll. So say you roll a 4 (+5 penetration) and you’re shooting at a T-34 with a damage value of a 9 you do a superficial hit as you’ve just tied the value. If you get a 10 you do a full on penetrating hit. Potential modifiers include side (-1), rear (-2) and long range (-1).

For the penetration roll, again it’s drop another d6. For a superficial hit it’s d6-3 and for a full penetrating hit just d6 unadjusted. A 4-6 brews up the tank, 1 (or less) is a stun, 2 is immobilized and 3 is a fire.

So take a KV2 or KV1. They’re a damage value of a 10. Ummm this is where one should remind the authors of the Bolt Action rules the stories of German tanks unable to deal with KVs. Literally. Yet by these rules a Pz IIIg is able to take one out with a direct frontal hit! Roll a 6 penetration, +5 penetration for a “medium” anti-tank gun for a 11 which gets you a roll for a full penetrating hit.

But even then when you get a penetrating hit, there’s no modifiers for the roll to see if you brew up the tank. Doesn’t matter where you sit in the category of “a medium” AT gun, it’s a straight up die roll. HVAP? Doesn’t matter, not in the rules.

Also consider the T-35, the Russian early war land battleship. Bolt Action gives this a damage value of 9, the same as the T34. It’s pretty well documented that the armor plates on the T34 performed much better than the T35 given the slant on the T-34 even tho the thickness of plates on the T-35 were at best 70mm which was more than the 1941 T34 variant which at best had 52mm of armor.

Let’s talk about small arms fire. It’s all d6, with one roll per rate of fire. There is a -1 for soft cover and -2 for hard cover on the to hit. Everything is a base 3+ to hit, with -1 for movement, and/or over half so long range. If you get a hit you cause a pin marker with each hit.

Pin markers I find novel as they stack up and for the unit afflicted with pin markers, next time you give the unit an order they have to make an “order” check which is their base moral minus the number of pin marks adjusted for leadership if nearby. If the unit fails, it might just do nothing and hit the dirt but you could also run away. Get more pin makers then your morale and poof that unit disappears, which for Russians in 1941, is an 8. A couple of turns of German MMG fire and this isn’t hard to accomplish.

Now the goofy part. So if you get a hit, you then roll based on the experience of the infantry you’re shooting at. So if they are vets, it’s a 5+ to eliminate and 3+ for inexperienced. But but but, what about if you’re in a trench? Or a stone building? Or ..  This is built into the initial to hit roll. So at best a trench will get you a -2 to hit. Starting at a 3+ to hit, modified to 5+, and say a machine gun, you’re bowling at pretty good odds. Now the target unit can go “down” which gets them a further -1 to hit, but STILL, troops in bulletproof cover don’t seem hard to deal with.

All it all, we found that it makes infantry pretty fragile and whole squads will disappear pretty quickly.

Other odd ball part of the game is assaults. If you start the assault within 6″ of your target, they get no defensive fire. None. 6″. This could be tied to the experience level of the troops being assaulted (and adjusted for leadership), but again, it’s not.

On the good side, we have played a couple of June 1941 games from the Skirmish Campaign source book Russia ’41 – Into the Ukraine by Scott Fisher and Nathan Forney. The Germans were via the use of the pin counters able to cause T34s and other Soviet units to lose effectiveness pretty quick and run/disappear which is a very reasonable historical result. This is something I look for in a set of rules.

The turn order of units in Bolt Action I very much like. Ideally you’d have a jar full of dice representing both sides, where you draw a die, then the side decided which unit to activate for one of six orders. Fire, Advance (and fire), Run, Ambush, Rally and Down make for a solid foundation of potential actions. While we didn’t have the special dice we used cards and that worked well, but the special dice gives you the ability to put the die down by the unit so you can see what order it has executed. I recommend picking up order dice.

This system of movement also lends well to building drama (and fun) as far as wanting to apply orders. Having to make tough choices as a table top leader really shows through in this part of the design of the game. In multi-player games tho it does mean everything is sitting around watching the one player perform whatever actions for the single unit.

Nothing is specified in the rules about terrain features. It’s really abstracted to be something far too simple. There are no rules of bogging or unbogging vehicles for instance! There’s nothing about how far to see into woods. I don’t know how a ruleset leaves out simple details like this!

All in all, I like the idea of a WWII skirmish game and really want a nice ruleset. Bolt Action least for me seems to fall short. Armor rules need fleshing out and like small arms fire is just too bound up by the use of d6s.

Our playtests didn’t make use of artillery but it really seems like the lack of artillery templates is unfortunate, especially for a “what you see is what you get” kind of game.

I’ll have a couple of playtest blog posts (with pictures) and I do think we’ll play test it a few more times so maybe my opinion my change but at first blush seems like the rules need a bit more work.