Random Thoughts About Bolt Action That Will Surprise Few People

While tossing and turning on Sunday night, trying to fall asleep despite the ridiculous one-hour time change (spring ahead and all that), and being fairly certain I would never sleep again, my thoughts turned to gaming.

My old school setup - at least, this is how I picture old school tables.

Here then are some random thoughts on Bolt Action (I'm really late to this party, so I doubt any of this is all that revealing to most people):

Although by design, everything is based individually, in effect, because each squad stays together, moves together, shoots together at the same target (with few exceptions), and is targeted together, it is not much different, mentally speaking, than a game where 1 base = 1 squad. You could probably use bases and a roster system just as well (but if you're doing that, why not field a company and play Company Command, Crossfire, Morschauser, etc.?)

The randomization of unit activation works well for solo gaming. Horses for courses of course, but as I noted previously, it feels more fun to draw the order die from the hat than roll a die for initiative; still not as fun as turning cards over though.

The fact that the rules as written require just 5 figures to field a squad means you don't need a lot of figures painted to start playing. You also don't have to worry about adjustments or breaking the game because of the lower-than-normal figure counts (originally I typed "having a small unit" and then laughed until I could't see, so I changed it. But here I have obviously just re-added it.).

I bought the rules on PDF - this may have been a mistake as it's not a small book by any means. There's a multi-page rules summary  (calling it a QRS would imply a much shorter document) that I'll have to print out for next time, but even then, I'll still have to lookup a lot of the details for the rules during play and I much prefer flipping physical pages - so much faster to get to the section you need.

BA gets a bad rap for being gamey and not enough of a simulation, but I don't fault oranges for not being apples - I like both for what they are.