Heer, there and everywhere : Adventures in Bolt Action

So, having painted my friends army, we were keen to put them to the test. We agreed 750 points and then threw in a tank each (he wanted to try his anti tank nutters).
I took a Matilda, he brought his Chi Ha.
This was a lot more complex than the handful of European games as both sides had lots of special rules.
A lot of tricks were missed.
Also the first game on a 4×4 layout, which made it quite an intense game (good though)

I failed to exploit some key Australian strengths with deployment, you really need to go through the book and create a bit of a checklist.

Australian forward units have aggressive patrolling, which create exclusion zones around them, this can impact opposition spotters and snipers. So I recommend placing them nice and early, maybe making a ‘safe’ corridor for vehicles.

Place your armour next to infantry and their detection of hidden units doubles in range, I would try to place them late on in deployment to foil the suicide AT units that can hide.

Remembering these can help put your opponent on the back foot, or at least in a sub optimal deployment.

The dice gods decided to punish me all through the game, my first action was my sniper missing, I believe he was firing nerf rounds as he later hit the Jaopanese commander three times and he didn’t die.

Conversely my opponents first mortar short was a hit and killed 4 out of 5 soldiers hit , oh and maximum pins. even my opponent was wincing at my die rolls.

I made a couple of mistakes that cost me heavily, when assaulting make sure you are too close for your opponent to get a free shot in first. I paid heavily with my engineers and commandos, mostly due to my opponents spectacular dice rolls. How often do you see seven riflemen take out four veteran fighters in one roll! With hindsight I should have got into point blank range and shot, rather than getting into hand to hand straight away.

Lots of assaults happened, it was a tense ,claustrophobic game, which seemed apt for a dense jungle skirmish.

Overall, it was a close fought game, overall I think the Japanese shaded it, but my mate claimed a draw