Bolt Action: The Green Machine

I was planning on posting about the Green Machine before our Combat Patrol tournament but... better late than never!  See let's take a look at just what the Green Machine is and just how it did at the tourney.

A couple of weekends back, I was able to make some good headway assembling the minis I need to make the Green Machine a reality.  Thankfully I already have a good chunk of the minis on hand, but one of the things that I was lacking was a engineer squad... or more specifically, the flamethrower team that can be part of an engineer squad.

Yeah, it was that kind of list.

I did a bit of hunting around locally to see if I could find the flamethrower team mini in stock but no such luck.  Instead, I had to resort to bashing one together and overall I'm pretty pleased with the results.

In case you're wondering, Sparky is the one in the front to the right of center.

I'm the first to say that it's not perfect; the "flamethrower" should have a nozzle on it, not to mention the complete lack of a hose attaching the weapon to the fuel tanks.  That said, I'm quite pleased with the results and I was looking forward to terrorizing people... I mean, fielding this unit at the Combat Patrol game.

Along with the engineers, there was a 2nd LT with minder, three six man infantry squads (each with a BAR of course), a medium machine gun team, and Stewie (AKA an M3 Stuart light tank with LOTS of machine guns).  And since I was just looking for quantity over quality, everyone except the engineers and Stewie was inexperienced... hence the unit was "The Green Machine".

Brownie points if you've already noticed what I did with the paint scheme!

As the curveballs kept coming, I realized that I wouldn't be able to paint them up the way that I wanted so I did the next best thing; I painted all of them green.  Yep, the Green Machine went from being a Bolt Action army to being a bunch of plastic toy soldiers in a matter of minutes and it really made me happy.  People also got a kick out of it at the tourney which is a plus in my book.  I wasn't going into the event to be uber competitive, I just wanted to push around some minis a goal that I was able to achieve readily.

Doing even vaguely well in the ranking?  Not so much.

At the end of the day, I managed to lead Stewie, Sparky, and their buddies all the way to 12th place our of fourteen players!  What made it even better was I scored lucky 13 for my point total and I had a good time in the process.  There were a couple of "Really?" moments as one of the players introduced some house rules to the event but whatever; it was the last game of the day and I just wanted to kill stuff so I rolled with it.

So will Bolt Action possibly become a thing again for me?  Quite possibly.  My LGS will be hosting another event this fall and I want to try to field a real army for it.  Not real as in list building minutia but what that has a story behind it.  I'm thinking the mechanized platoon that I've always wanted to run, except I'm going to pick up a couple of SDKFZ's instead of using M3 half tracks.  I prefer the look of the SDKFZ, and I like the idea of a late war US force that was been pushing into German territory.  Their own vehicles were damaged or broke down so the did the next best thing; steal from the Germans!  Of course before I can do that, I need to buy the models which is all the more reason to pace things out.  I believe the earliest that they are looking at for the next event is September so I should be able to get some practice games in plus start making my minis look like a real army.  Until next time...