Bolt Action: Winter US Vehicles

Happy Tanksgiving everybody. To celebrate, we’ll finish up my initial Bolt Action army with the vehicles.

Usually I try to apply some new techniques when starting a new army/game. For Bolt Action I’ve been pretty mild in that department. For the vehicles I decided to push things a bit. I used a salt weathering technique for the whitewash.

M10 Tank Destroyer
M10 Tank Destroyer

I picked up some Dust Tactics decal sheets off the clearance shelf a year or so ago for literally a quarter. Finally, I’ve got some models in the right scale. The octopus and “DEMON” labels on the M10 come from these sheets.

M3 Half-track

In game, the half-track is a maddening vehicle. I’ve tried to use it as rapid response, but after leaving it in reserve, it never comes out. Many of our campaign games have used the Chaos in the Reserves rule, which not only nullifies the normal American advantage for vehicles in reserve, it adds an extra negative modifier. Arrgh.

Bolt Action: Winter US Support Teams

Now that HQ and infantry are accounted for, it’s time to bring in some support teams to do some damage.

I’ve had mixed results with the mortar. Some games it can’t hit anything. Other games it snipes out a key unit first turn and is awesome. The campaign has mostly put the Americans on the defensive, with the Germans attacking. I suppose once that swaps, the mortar’s ability to force a unit to move prove useful.

My first game I found I was quite lacking in anti-tank. A bazooka team helps to solve that.

Medium machinegun
Medium machinegun

The MMG seems to get a bad rap, but while in ambush it can really put pressure on the enemy. When the fog is clear enough to see anything, anyways.

Finally, the sniper team. Fog has been tough on snipers, but removing key models makes it all worthwhile.

Bolt Action: Winter US Infantry

The core of Bolt Action is a block of infantry. Given my tight timeline (and fond memories of Band of Brothers), I quickly settled on using Airborne. They’re vets, so more points per model leads to fewer models needed. I mostly used the metal winter infantry set, but with a few plastic paratrooper models for spice. I was quite disappointed to learn that Warlord’s interchangeable head system does not go across plastic and metal sets. The scales don’t quite match.

By the time I was done, I had three squads with nine men each.

Bolt Action: Winter US HQ

As the Team Yankee campaign was winding down, I started looking around for what would come next. Mike, who ran the Team Yankee campaign, was going to be starting a Bolt Action Battle of the Bulge campaign. I had never played but long been interested in Bolt Action, so I got a demo and jumped in head first, with a little over a month to get the army ready.

I had kind of wanted to do Germans, since I almost always end up playing some form of “generic good guy” Americans. I signed up too late, however, and the campaign was short on Americans. Such is life.

I saw someone mentioning putting NCOs on 30mm bases instead of the standard 25mm to help them stand out. I quite liked that idea, and went with it throughout the army. That includes things like the officer.

I adopted a fairly quick-and-dirty paint approach to get it done. Most of the paints are from the Vallejo US Infantry set, with some yellow mixed in to highlight and Secret Weapon armor wash across the whole thing. It’s been a while since I’ve done a game with this kind of model count. I had forgotten how much faster it is to batch paint uniforms than to do a bunch of unique models.

Forward Observer
Forward Observer

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