Bolt Action AAR: Combat Patrol Tournament With Cheese

This past Saturday, I headed down to Greenhouse Games for their Inaugural Bolt Action Combat Patrol Tournament.  This event pitted eight players against each other over three rounds using a 450 point list.  Previous BA tournaments they have run were 750 points so dropping 300 points made for a very different list building experience.  In addition to the low points, there were also a couple of other limits just to keep the lists from being too crazy.

• maximum of 8 order dice
• no free units of any kind
• no weapons with HE 3" or HE 4"
• maximum of one flamethrower
• no vehicle-mounted flamethrowers
• maximum of three vehicles
• no vehicles with armor of 9 or higher
• no air force or artillery forward observers
• no captain or major

Nothing too extreme and it all really makes sense; this is supposed to be a combat patrol so it should be small forces of mostly infantry units.  To drive that point home even more, the two of the three scenarios in the tournament require you have infantry units to achieve their objectives.  All in all, a really good and balanced set up.

While I was researching units for my list (my experience with Bolt Action is still pretty limited), I stumbled across a unit that I believe was actually banned from other tournaments; the M3 Stuart.  Now anyone familiar with this tank might wonder why it would cause such consternation in the community.  It is a light armor with poor armor design, making it even more vulnerable to attacks from the sides and rear.  This is true, but the base design mounts a light AT gun, a coaxial MMG, and a hull-mounted MMG.  Still not horrible... but then you can give it recce, add a pair of hull mounted LMGs, and even add a pintle mounted MMG.  This means that this light tank is rolling 23 dice in one turn if it just fires its machine guns.

As luck would have it, I happened to have a Stuart that I had never assembled.  Given the low point limit, I was trying to find a light tank that I could fit into the list but there aren't a lot of other options for the US.  I thought about making it an M3A1 or M5A1, but the first couldn't have recce and the later had a gyro-stabilized AT gun which is a waste if you aren't taking a veteran.  So the only thing that made sense... the machine gun toting monster that is the M3.

I looked at other list options because this made Stewie take up a third of the points but nothing really jumped out at me.  I verified with the tourney organizers and they said it was okay, so machine gun monster it would be.

Now this is a lot of background but there's a reason.  The day of the competition, I was running the middle of the pack but had to leave because the whole thing was really running behind.  My parting gift?

Cheese pin markers for having the Cheesiest Army List of the day.  And I have to admit that this just made my day.  All thanks to good old Stewie, the biggest cheese of them all.  Until next time...