"Ideas for Speeding Up Bolt Action Activation" Topic

I like BA and I enjoy running convention games with 6 to 8 players, but I am concerned that the single dice activation system of BA will have non activated players drifting away from the game table. I welcome suggestions from more experienced Bolt Action players.

I put on a 6 player WW1 BA game at last years H-Con. 2 German players defending, 2 Brit players & 2 French players attacking. What I did was every time a German die was drawn, the other German players got one too. The same for the Brits & French. It went very well. Big fun was had by everyone & the game finished on time both Fri & Sat nights. Just my 2 cents…

Ceterman, thanks! Sounds good. But, say there were three or four German players. Wouldn't giving each of them a die at the same time give them an overwhelming advantage in firepower and/or attack, especially if they were able to concentrate their forces? Same with the allies.

I've run big games that move along well.

Broke the field into 3 zones that were largely blocked from line of sight from each other. Each zone has it's own dice bag and pulls and runs on their own time, starting their own new turn whenever needed. It doesn't matter if the zones run on different speeds.

Whenever a unit want to crosses from one zone to another, add it's die to the new zone bag at the sart of the next turn for that bag.

If a unit does take a shot into another zone, just shoot whenever that happens.

We've do a very similar thing for six events now I think after trying a couple of other methods. we pair opponents up with their own dicebags and draws.

Players are free to interact across tables as the opportunity presents itself. Players simply wait for their cross table opponent to finish their activation if they're attacking and then interrupt, complete the activation and continue with the game. I tell players to be gentlemanly. We do not mix dicebags though, if you're unit is on another table/zone/whatever you want to call it you still activate it from YOUR dicebag.

We sync up turns, IE: no one goes onto another turn until ALL players are done. I've found that the game flows well and it gives the players who finished first a chance to get a drink or clean up piles of dead minis etc…

Our last event with this method was an 8 player D-Day event on a 24 foot table and the game play itself was done in 4 hours for 6 turns.

NIck,
That didn't seem to be the case at all for us. We play tested it about 10-15 times & when you are playing on a large area, your forces, or at least ours, are usually st up far enough away that each player has an "area" to defend or attack so if you concentrate everything on one point of attack, you will pay for that with the troops you failed to confront on your second or third points of attack. We did not have this problem arise at all & we played on a 5 x 3 foot board with trenches & lots of NML/no cover areas. That's pretty dangerous area no matter how ya look at it and yet we had the Germans squeak out a victory on Friday night & the Allies take the German trenches, with not a whole lot left, on Saturday. The Allies had 3 AFV also. So I think it worked extremely well, personally.

Ceterman, I bow to your experience and knowledge of the game. My thinking is all theoretical at this point.

Nick, Please get up off the floor! I just winged it! But that's why we play-tested it. But in terms of BA & for that matter MOST(if not all) wargame rules, if you have a force that needs to cross a pretty long way with no cover, it's gonna take a lot of luck & good rolls to succeed(both of which usually escape my play!) We had many different outcomes in our play-tests & indeed, in the 2 games we put on, therefore my assessment that the way we sped up the game, really did just that, without determining the outcome.

Another option, if you are having multiple players go on the same die, is to just not allow different players to target the same unit on a given die pull.

We take a different approach. We do the dice draw the same way with drawing a dice for each side but we let teams team up if they want. After all joint commands do work together. It has never become an over powering problem in the several games we have played. If you concentrate power in one place you end up weak some where else. they key is to have objectives spread out so multiple areas are important.

Is there a new bug? Who is whitphoto quoting?

andy

Andy, He is quoting another answer from someone on his first thread. The bug hit & created 2 threads. Nick must have deleted one. But that reply was on the other thread.

Missed this, so sorry for resurrecting, but what we do is…make the players responsible for their own dice; they just have them in front of them. Have a deck with one card (red for Allies, black for Axis)for the number of dice per player. Turn over a card and each player on that side deploys a dice – or more if you're using 'snap to it'. With losses and 'snap to it' a player may have no dice left when a card is turned over…that's life. We've done this for a few years now and it works pretty well for big games 'at home' or at public events and is easy to grasp for newcomers to the group. Obviously someone has to take responsibility for the deck of cards, but we usually have an umpire – game manager – person who talks to the public. To reduce dithering I sometimes produce an egg-timer and tell the ditherers they have that long to play or they miss that order….I've never actually had to do it.

How about having a couple {use two die} dice in the bag? It would slightly speed up the game but also allow the owner to plan some co-ordinated attacks/actions. It would change the style of the game a bit as well.

Hey Nick,

I run a game club for students at my school, and have been using Bolt Action rules in the way you're describing. I transformed the turn sequence into IGOUGO with each player activating one of their units. I make each player declare what they are firing at BEFORE rolling any dice for the very issue that players could concentrate fire given that they are activating all at once. It's working out really well. I also concur with a few of the other comments here- many times the players are so fixated on whats in front of them that they don't bother coordinating with other players to maximize firepower.

Hope that helps!

J