I have been busy getting Bolt Action stuff gathered up and ready to go. Eventually I want to be able to play Axis or Allies in the Pacific, eastern front, western front, and Africa theaters. Right now with my Germans painted I have Axis Eastern and Western front covered. I plan on painting USMC for Pacific Allies, 82nd Airborne for western front, and Japanese for the Pacific. That leaves Africa and eastern front Allies... maybe a project for 2015. (I should say the game is designed to have any army face off against any - I just figure as a Sarge I should be able to give someone the game they want. Plus the models are beautiful.)
Bonzai!
I picked up the Japanese 1,000 point box to put together on our vacation after my 2 year old son goes to sleep. My parents have a nice screened in porch that should be great at night. $125 for a full 1,000 point army (all you'll ever need) can't be beat by almost any game.
One of the unique mechanics in Bolt Action is the pin marker. Each time your unit is hit by shooting from a unit they take a pin to represent suppression. This is key as it makes it harder for units to activate once they've been hit etc.
We started off marking this with dice and it got somewhat clunky. The dice get confused between what was rolled etc. I picked up some MDF 'casualty markers' that make it really easy to see what is going on. They're nice, and I can do some customization on them, so I think I'll generalize them and make them my 'Allies' casualty markers. I'll paint them an olive drab and put stars on.
Historique offers some really sweet pin markers at a really cheap price (I think $1.25 per?). The gentleman just had surgery so he isn't making more until July 4th. They seem to be made out of a thin wood + printed paper. They look great and will definitely enhance the look of the board. He can produce pretty much anything from any unit. Check out their FB page.
KR Multicase
As we have said before we love KR Multicase. They make amazing products and have sponsored Foodhammer every year with an amazing prize set. Their soft blue foam really does treat my minis so much better. I recently purchased two cardboard cases with foam and plan to have this be enough for all my Bolt Action needs.
As you can see the infantry fit great into even the smallest pre-cut slots. Most of them can stand up. I bought mostly infantry trays as Bolt Action is a mostly infantry game (although I have quite a few German tanks, I plan to only have one or two for the rest of my armies).
Weapons teams in Bolt Action go on a 60mm base. The cutouts for these are great and the models fit in just fine. I'm excited for the pre-cut foam because holy cow picking and plucking takes a while (FWP).
I believe this one is for jeeps etc. You can remove up to two sections to make it longer.
The tank sections again have two extra pieces to remove in case the model is longer, plus they have a side piece you can remove to make it wider (as you can see, my PZIV needed more space for schurzen).
An overall shot of all my stuff so far. I should be all set with these two cases for all my BA models!
Die Waffenkammer (JTFM) Panzer III
This company seems to be a one-man shop out of Canada. He produces extremely high quality 1/56 scale models that oftentimes aren't made anywhere else. His site is pretty amazing with tons of German models, Allies, stowage, decals, and crew models. I suggest if you find something you like and you're in the US get them from Brigade Games as they're in the USA so shipping cost and speed will be much better. I recently purchased a PanzerIII N (a small howitzer tank) from JTFM.
Some pics from JTFM's site. Casting that many tanks would be =D. He has plenty of painted shots of models if you're interested in them.
The Schurzen and extra parts, including stowage. It seems like the parts you might normally glue on, like headlamps, mgs, etc. are molded on, which is sweet. I am afraid that the schurzen is really really thin and prone to breaking but I'll have to see how that goes.
The tank itself was nicely wrapped in styrofoam.
The turret itself is very highly detailed. Now I have to figure out what scheme to paint it :P I wanted to do a panzer gray but I think most of the N variant were produced after gray was used. I may just do a dunkelgelb plus red brown scheme and see how that goes.
Company B Hex Tiles
Company B is another producer of some amazing tanks that aren't always seen everywhere. I have picked up quite a few decals, stowage, and even a Kubelwagon. They make an awesome line of Japanese miniatures that I'll be perusing once I get my Warlord stuff put together.
I picked up a pack of 12 of these resin hexes. They're relatively simple, and I could just cut them out of foam or whatever, but these were $5 and saves me all that time. I'm planning to put together some Pacific jungle terrain (that will work well for 40k as well) so these will help with that type of scatter terrain.
Tank War Preview
Obviously one of the coolest things about wargaming WW2 is the tank element. A few people I talked to about the game really wanted to just put tank forces together. You can do that in Flames of War, but Bolt Action is more focused on infantry combat - most of the time you can have one tank, one armored car, etc.
Tank War is scheduled to come out in September according to Amazon (I'll be ordering it at Gamers Sanctuary). This supplement seems to focus on purely tank combat - the likes of which you might see at Kursk, where the Soviets lost over 6,000 tanks and the Germans lost an estimated ~750. Human casualties for the Soviets were ~177,000 and the germans 54,000. The scale of the battle was immense.
I am very excited for this as it gives us a new way to play and perhaps get more players in! Check out Bolt Action.net's great preview here.
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