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| Before the crowds arrived |
We arrived early on the day of Victorius 25 at Box Hill Town Hall, and unloaded the very full cars with all the bits and pieces we needed for the game - Battle for Outer Cherbourg.
After a little negotiation with our neighbouring tables, we made a gap around our table so we were able to move from the front to the back and reach all parts of the board.
Satisfied, we stood back and announced to each other we were ready.
Then we realised we forgot to bring a copy of the rule book! Oops. We quickly borrowed a copy from one of our graduates who were playing in the competition.
NOW we were ready!
The doors opened at 10am and the people kept on coming. The first 20 minutes we had a few interested but they wanted to do a trip around all the marvellous demo tables first. Couldn't blame them for that.
The way we run a demo game is that we are in the front of the table on the side of the visitors, showing them the board.
As I said to Sebastian, "Remember the one critical criteria that is needed when you try to convince someone to play."
"What's that?" he asked.
"They're breathing," I answered firmly.
By 10:30 we started our first game. All were new players, although one had watched videos so had an idea of what was involved.
I explained to many of the players one advantage of a board with multiple levels is that you get all these amazing angles and situations of cover and movement. I explained that in one of our games some years ago, a young lad ran his units up along the railway track. Older, "wiser" players suggested he was wasting his time as all the action was on the ground level.
Then on turn 4, the lad raced his unit up the stairs and captured the objective!
Grinning, the wiser, now more experienced, players apologised and told him he did well.
We ended up playing 3 games during the 6 hours, each having 4 players (with one being a father/son team), so 13 players in total. All were new or had only seen Bolt Action on line. As we have experienced in the past, by the end of turn one all players had a good grasp of the game mechanics, by turn two they started realising implications of dice, cover, range and weapons, and by turn 3 they knew what to do with only a little guidance from us.
650 point, 6 to 8 dice forces worked really well. Each pair of players shared a dice bag, but they could fire across the board at the other opposing player.
Typically turn one or two when a tank fired across the railway line made all players far more conscious of the possibilities!
The board had three objectives. To capture one, you needed at least 3 men from a unit within 3 inches of the objective at the end of the game.
One objective was the fountain with the girl cooling her feet in the water, pretending to ignore the young lad singing on his guitar.
There was plenty of cover, but players quickly worked out the impact of having no cover (bad) and the impact of who gets to move first or last. At times I had to volunteer a spectator to pull a dice from the bag so the players couldn't blame me or their opponent, especially when the dice pull was critical.
This objective was the mysterious wooden crate labelled "From Palestine to Indiana State University".
It was on the flatbed of the train carriage, overlooked by the bridges, with tunnels and balconies. Lots of shooting and racing! The power of pinning a unit affected the last turn with the British failing morale rolls, the Germans above failing morale, and the German unit on the platform charging through and grabbing the objective with the last dice. Victory!
After 6 hours of games, we didn't actually need to open the rule book. Ha!
War and Peace Games sponsored us with some Bolt Action figure sprues. We built a number of sample figures of all types from various armies, found some appropriate containers and packed them with some newspaper so the figure wouldn't get damaged and labelled each one appropriately. Every player received a figure as a thank you for playing.
This was greatly appreciated by the players as they had something tangible to take home to remind them of their experience.
Do these demo games work? We know they do. A quarter of the players in the competition at Victorius 25 were our graduates from the Bolt Action Boot Camp last year.
The demo games we ran some years ago resulted in many new players still in the hobby today.
I started playing back when I was 12 (that's a long time ago!). The Nunawading Wargames Association ran their Open Day and I played my first war-game. Great fun, and I have been a gamer ever since.
Victorius is the latest development from the open games days the club has been running for almost 50 years!
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