14th July - 12th July Bolt Action Games vs The Youngest

The Youngest has been on a push this school holidays trying to get her WW2 Italians knocked over so she can move on to her next project either her Martian Dreadball team or her Wild West Indians I'm told. I'm fairly impressed with the effort she's made on them. We decided that seeing as we hadn't managed to fit in a miniature game so far in the holidays we'd take advantage of having a day to ourselves and have a game before she went back to school yesterday.

She's been keen to play another game of Bolt Action since beating me with The Wife's Japanese previously, so I set up an abandoned farm area on the table and we set up for a Total Annihilation scenario. I let her pick her side (the forested/hilly side of the road) and off we went.

The first turn had both of us advancing cautiously up with most of our forces. I kept my Hetzer and Flamethrower team carrying Half-track in reserve. She chose to keep her armoured car, an infantry unit and her medium machine gun and mortar teams back to re-enforce her line as needed.

For the next couple of turns she managed to keep me on the back foot. The first pins, wounding shots and unit kills going to her. I was forced to play defensively and ended up mostly trying to get pins out on her more well placed units trying to open up some room to move. 

She finally made a mistake on the left flank falling for a unit with a couple of panzerfaust and sending all her fire that way. Thankfully they stayed up and the order dice were kind enough to allow me to then follow up with a second unit who the following turn managed to take out her tankette, just. But that reduced the number of pins she was  able to spread across that side quite significantly. She did then re-enforce with another full strength infantry unit, but it was too late on that side.
  The centre had us bother well matched with little movement on either side, but on the right flank some bad dice rolls cost her the game. It wasn't until turn three I managed to get my half track on and she did her best to take it out before I could get anywhere with it. Using her last order die to take a shot, rolling a five and missing by one. Then her first order die of turn four went to it rather than her tank. Unfortunately on both counts as she then rolled a four (needing a five and again missing by one) and then losing her tank to my next order die before she had a chance to get some pins on the killing unit.

More bad luck for her as The Wife came home and decided she would pull order dice for us and proceeded to give me almost all of mine a row. Which allowed me to throw quite a lot of pin markers around including managing to actually use my flamethrower team for the first time ever! This led to her conceding the game with five units either killed or fled and bed time fast approaching.

We had a great time and are definitely going to get another one in some time soon. We're also going to be looking at some different options for her Italians to give her a bit of flexibility depending on opponent and scenario.