Playing Bolt Action Rules for Warlord Era China

Ever since Steve kindly gifted me a box of 28mm Chinese Warlord figures back in April, along with some rather splendid buildings and scenery, I’ve been trying to work out what to do with them.

Playing around with the armies and scenery at home

For their first outing, we used Chain of Command, but I found all the setting up of patrol markers to be a bit faffy, when I’m used to just bringing figures straight onto the board (Fog of War cards in Général d’Armée notwithstanding). Having played A Very British Civil War using Bolt Action rules, transferring those to my guys seemed like a logical next step, especially considering that the two groups of figures share both a rough era and some weaponry types that were probably not envisioned by the original game designers.

Chain of Command game: nice set up, shame about the ruleset

My original plan was to have two armies (plus 8 rather lost and possibly temporarily displaced Moroccan goumiers) meet at a bridge with two roads approaching it on both sides. Other people, however, had already bagged most of the road pieces, so I settled for a bridge with one road passing over it. One army controlled the fort at the beginning, the other was occupying the temple, and the Moroccans had their own little stronghold by the bridge in the tower I didn’t need for my fort construction.

The Moroccans set off from their tower (or is it a TARDIS?)

Gameplay, once the two armies had met and the Moroccans had decided whose side they were on, was short, fast and brutal. Hand-to-hand combat in Bolt Action generally results in one or other of the groups fighting being wiped out, with no adjustments for disparities in weaponry between the two sides. It was a lot of fun, and I came up with a whole list of changes to make future outings for my figures even more fun.

Brutal hand-to-hand combat

1) We could probably have done with playing on a bigger area, and possibly with larger groups than 5 men and one officer. Mixing the groups up a bit could also have balanced things out, instead of trying to pitch a group armed with submachine guns against one armed with swords.

Fighting against the scenery

2) I need to come up with some rules for swords, since they ought to be able to do a lot more damage at close quarters than can be inflicted by guys carrying projectile weapons only. Likewise I need a proper rule for those times in the game when mercenaries (like my Moroccans) or other not particularly loyal bandits could potentially switch their allegiances (I have a couple of scenarios in mind that will create just that occurrence).

Moroccans sneaking around their tower again

3) In future games I really need to set experience levels for the troops and rankings for the officers, rather than everyone being pretty much equal.

Preparing to open fire across the river

4) Looking back to our Chain of Command game with my guys, we also need to set a rule for attacking buildings – in the sense of breaking in through the front door – and figure out how much damage a building can take before its walls or doors are breached.

Machine guns out of context, just because...

At some point I’d like to play my Warlord Armies against a bunch of Russian – Adrian M should have enough of them, if I remember correctly. I also quite fancy getting a few other random figures to boost the numbers: possibly the Pulp Explorers from Bad Squiddo Miniatures, or a couple of sets of Female Soviet Infantry Squads as antagonists: from the same source.