The Pendulum Swings...

Bolt Action Back on the Painting Table!

Having begun to make some considerable progress with my Swordpoint Carthaginians over the balmy days of Summer, the time came to make the annual pilgrimage to the Newark Showground, to wander gobsmacked round the hallowed halls of the Other Partizan. When I looked through the contents of the programme, I noticed a demonstration game being put on by a wargaming club from my home town; this was a different club to the one that was aware of and their demonstration game was an Allies v Germans Bolt Action scenario... Although I was delighted to find a very active club based just a few miles from home, I began to get a feeling that my current target of 32 wild Gauls for my Carthaginian host might just be about to get side-lined!

As you can see, once again, enthusiasm for a game at a show got the better of me and I was sucked in to that old Bolt Action Attraction that I first experienced watching a demo game on Beasts of War and, since returning home from Partizan, I've been consumed by Joseph Stalin and his Communist ideology! 

I'd already painted the squad leader in the picture above and, apart from the fact that I'd armed him with a Mosin-Nagant M91 instead of a nice juicy sub-machine gun, I decided that I might as well use him as the starting point for a reinforced Soviet infantry platoon that I could take along to the club sometime fairly soon. 

There is much about the Soviets that really appeals to me, both as a painter and a gamer, not least the fact that their method of warfare and leadership dovetails very nicely with my own complete lack of tactical battlefield skill. Charging headlong into a storm of lead and hoping for the best is exactly what is written in my little red book of table top tactics.

From a painting point of view, the Soviets have proved very entertaining, in as much that all the information I have managed to acquire about uniform colours, suggests that 'uniform' is probably not the right word to use. It appears that the factories that produced uniforms were never given a proper brief as to what exact shade  the uniforms they were making should be and, as a consequence, they arrived with combat units in a multitude of assorted colours. Coupled with the fact that the materials, dyes and mordents used were all very poor quality, which lead to a rapid fading process, means that I get to paint individual figures in a medley of relatively miscellaneous colours! I have stuck to the colours which are mentioned in the painting guides that I have assembled and conformed to some degree of uniformity by only using Vallejo 894 (Cammo Olive Green) for helmets.

The one downside that I have discovered so far in choosing a Soviet force to build, is that there is a relatively large number of infantry to paint. In fact, the Bolt Action army lists are so keen on making you paint more figures than anybody else, that they even give a you a free 11 man squad of riflemen. Being one of the World's slowest painters is a decided disadvantage in this respect.

All in all, however, I have to say that I have definitely been bitten by the Soviet bug. Comrade Stalin and I will get on very well I think (until the next purge at any rate) and it's nice to find an army whose ideology and methodology you feel totally comfortable with. I'm not sure that I'll be setting up my Maxim medium machine gun directly behind the witless dullards, that I've sent scurrying haplessly towards the Fascist battle line, ready to gun down any shirkers who think it's acceptable to turn back and not give their lives for Mother Russia, but, I shall be singing "The Internationale" and waving the Red Flag as my boys hurl their Molotov Cocktails bravely into the advancing Panzer's jaws of death... on second thoughts, I might have to scour the rules to see what pluses I can get if they drink the stuff instead.