Bolt Action & bargaining

Unfortunately, I didn't get to run the next session of my Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign this weekend due to a busy schedule, but I am hoping to get the next session run this weekend coming. however, this weekend certainly wasn't a loss gaming-wise, thanks once again to the great folk at Nebula Custom Gaming.I spent my Saturday afternoon holed up in the store and managed to get quite a bit of gaming in.

For the first hour or so that i was there I got to try something new (thanks in the main due to one of Nebula's co-owners, Vince and his patience!), which was the table top war game Bolt Action. This is the first time I have ventured outside of anything Warhammer 40k related for wargaming, and the first war game I have played for at least 3 years, so I was really keen to give it a go.

The game is played out over 6 turns between 2  opposing armies, trying to achieve an objective, which is all very standard for a table top war game. What is different about Bolt Action is that instead of each player taking it in turn to play out moves for their whole army, a bag of custom dice are used to decide which unit takes the next action, until every unit has had an action, then the turn advances.

Order dice: one of the ways Bolt Action keeps things interesting.

Vince kindly agreed to demo the game for me and so we set up our opposing armies (he played as the Americans, I chose the Germans). The objective was focused on the German half-track, which I had to preserve and Vince had to destroy. Early on it looked as though the Germans were doing rather well: the American Bazooka kept on missing the half-track and my machine gunners and rifle-men were picking off a good number of G.Is (shame my sniper appeared to be blind). However, due to the unpredictable nature of how the order dice come out, this can change very quickly and on turn three the half-track took an immobilising hit from the Americans: not so bad I thought, as long as I take out the Bazooka team. However, this didn't happen and on turn 4 the Americans once again got the first order, hit the half-track and got an immobilised result again, resulting in its destruction and an American victory. We played out the remaining 2 turns but this just resulted in my infantry squad FUBARing and shooting their commanding officer in the confusion!

As a first taste of Bolt Action, I have to say I loved it! It's been a long time since I really enjoyed table top war gaming, with Warhammer 40k having lost my interest, so it was really great to find one I enjoyed. It certainly shares many things in common with Warhammer (no shock when you realise Rick Priestly is one of the designers for it), but it felt different enough to be interesting. Thanks Vince for running me through it, I really appreciated it.

After I had finished my demo game of Bolt Action I managed to get down to a few games of Magic: the Gathering. I played one of my in progress decks, a green-white Selesyna inspired deck, in a 4 player game and did respectably although not spectacularly. Thanks to one of the regulars at Nebula, Lee, I acquired an Ajani, Mentor of Heroes which should help this deck out quite a lot.

Ajani: my new planeswalker to add into my work in progress G/W deck.

Along with playing regular Magic, I also got to try my hand at multiplayer Commander. This was a really interesting game, as its slower than standard Magic and has a lot of politics to it. I recently acquired the Commander 2013 Nature of the Beast deck, and did consider running that out, but instead I plumped for my home-brewed Goblin commander deck led by Wort, Boggart Auntie. It proved to be a really enjoyable game despite losing heavily to Lee's Vampire deck, which managed to take out both myself and the third player in the game, Jake in one turn. I am now thinking of ways to improve the goblins, and I hope to get some more Commander in soon. All in all it was a fun filled Saturday afternoon of gaming, and I can't wait until I get to do it again.