Getting into Bolt Action – what sets should I buy? (Budget - £600)

[vodkafan]

For me personally, I base my units on historical TO&Es. 

Yeah, but this is Bolt Action 

[Major_Gilbear]

In my limited experience, many people seem to have strong feelings about certain rulesets. However, the nice thing about historical wargames in that (basing specifics aside!) you can generally use them with lots of different rulesets.

I would therefore *strongly* suggest getting something more modest as an initial starter force for each side, and try playing some games with them first.

To guide you, I would probably pick a period/theatre of the war that interests you, and begin with a smaller number of suitable models.

For example, let's say you were interested in the North Africa theatre, and wanted to field some German forces against the British. I would then start with a couple of boxes of plastic troops for each side, along with a couple of trucks, a couple of half tracks, and maybe a light tank each. There should be enough stuff in the infantry boxes to make some command models with, and also a selection of support weapons. The only thing I might add is a single weapons sprue (if you're buying direct from Warlord, or from ebay) to provide any small arms you may want but which aren't in the troops boxes.

If after a few games you find that Bolt Action isn't to your liking, or that a different force/theatre has taken your fancy, at least you're not so deep in that you feel you can't swap or give a different ruleset a go.

With BA specifically, it was always designed to be based on a game size of about one platoon plus some support elements. Obviously, bigger and smaller games are possible, and many supplements have been released since; but at it's heart, this is the size of game where the rules generally work best. And at this game size, whilst having some options to choose from in your forces is of course nice, you'll probably get more variety from the games if you change up the terrain setups and scenarios instead (and that potentially doesn't require more money/time/painting!).

Based on this comment:

As I am reading and watching more and more about the game [...]

It seems fairly probable that you have watched Tabletop CP on YouTube - as well as Bolt Action, the guys there also do Chain of Command (another WW2 platoon-level ruleset), and even back-to-back games with similar forces and terrain but using different rulesets to show how they can differ. I mostly mention them, as their forces are reasonably typical of what many players might field, and they do also use the same models across the various different games they play.

[AdmiralAndy]

I would suggest in starting, that WW2 wargaming tends to breakdown into 3 areas when looking at what how to game.

1/ Time period, Early war when the Axis did well, Blitzkrieg and Rommels war in the desert, invasion of Russia. Mid war, America enters the war in Africa/Italy  and advance in Russia Stalls, and battles in the Pacific, then Late War, final actions in the pacific, D-Day, Operation market Garden, Fall of the Reich leading to Battle of Berlin.

2/ Once decided which period to start with, select which forces you want to game with, Germans if Europe are must buy, Japanese if Pacific. Could get almsot any of the allies forces as most fought  in Europe and Pacific.

3/ Once decided when and where want to start gaming (you can always add other periods and battles later on), then look for the correspondening Caampaign book, BA has been going about 10 years and Warlords have a book to cover a period and theatre of war. Then look to see if there's a corresponding battle box, like the D-Day, Pegasus Bridge, or Fall of the Reich etc, there upto a few hundred so should be enough to get started and addon then as go along.

Happy gaming with whatever you decide, hope the above is helpful.

You don't have to spend your budget all in one go...

[Storm-the-front]

I would advise against Bolt Action and 28mm in the long run. This is where I started too and it became obvious that 28mm is far out of scale for a 6x4 table and the Bolt Action rules did nothing to try and capture issues found in WWII combat. You will end up moving to smaller scales for WWII and different rules with time.