Bolt Action is often used as an example of a 28mm historical game that can be used to ease-in fresh players of… less well-made games. This legacy continues with the latest iteration, Bolt Action 3rd edition.
Bolt Action is primarily a 28mm game where two reinforced platoon-sized forces vie for supremacy. Certainly that’s the amount of forces that fit the recommended 1000 points army. Online, you’ll see people playing much larger games – 1Kpts is just a good starting point. You’ll also see lists featuring more than a single platoon – that’s the new army-building rules in play. For our playtest purposes, we managed to fit a near max-size Rifle platoon (mandatory) and some tanks.
The killer feature of Bolt Action is alive an well in the new edition: the order dice. Every unit in your force generates one as long as they live. At the start of the turn, both you and the other player drop all their order dice in a bag. Then one of you draws randomly. If you dice is drawn – you activate a unit. If it’s theirs – they activate a unit. This continues until the bag is empty, and then you start the next turn.
The orders are easy and specific, no freeform “each order allows a unit to do two actions” nonsense. Fire allows a unit to fire at full effect, Advance gives you movement and fire, Run doubles your movement rate and/allows charging into melee, and so on. The big change in the new edition is that Rally now wipes away all the pins (rather than just D6) a unit has, making it a lot more reliable.
Pins are another Bolt Action staple. If your unit gets shot at and hit, it gets a pin, even if no casualties are inflicted. No, I’m not seething and malding that in Horus Heresy, Pinning is still a special rule for only some weapons. Pins make you roll modified unit morale to see if they accept orders and make it harder to hit enemies in combat. At the extreme end, if you accrue too many pins, the unit will rout off the table. If only other games were as cool about the effects of suppression and such!
Now, the 3rd edition makes too many small changes to the rules to properly enumerate here. But the one that caused the most crying and shitting is the introduction of cover saves. Whereas you previously rolled to hit and to wound, now, units in cover get cover saves. The bad people claim it to be 40K creeping in. More reasonable and sexier podcasters say that it’s fine, as cover saves need to be earned via movement and positioning, and there are multiple ways of taking them away – notably, by firing from within 6″. This not only allows infantry in cover to be harder to shift – like it was historically – but also let the devs reduce the number of modifiers to the hit/wound rolls.
Another good flattening of the rules is separating officers into two classes: platoon and company commanders. Previously, we had two types of each and it was a pain trying to remember which had what stats. But it’s not all simplification. For example, the new edition has expanded vehicle damage charts, with superficial damage (dealt without dedicated AT weapons) getting it’s own chart. Bolt Action’s implementation of vehicles to most games out there.
Bolt Action 3E remains a great entry in the WW2 game category and a good choice for anyone wanting to have a fast bash. And once you collect an army for it, you can move to Chain of Command… and back again! Nobody says that you can’t play both.
