By Peter, Parker Hobbies
Parker Hobbies was founded primarily to improve the accessibility of otherwise hard-to-get painting and hobby products for New Zealand’s Scale Modelling and Tabletop Wargaming communities. Like many of us keen model builders, I personally love getting them on the tabletop for some gaming with mates. So I thought it was about time I give tournament organisation a go!
The forces of the USA advance through a European village towards
a German defended position
This past weekend we hosted our first tabletop wargaming event at the Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club, thanks to the invitation of Hamilton Immortals Miniature Wargaming Club, who call the Cossie Club their home. The one-day event ran from 8.30am until 4.30pm on Saturday, 30th March 2024. We played a game called Bolt Action, which draws its 1/56 scale models and scenarios from the historical setting of WW2.
Logan's Soviet army, modelled in a snowy destroyed city
There were two teams of four players, the Axis and the Allies, who were paired off into 1v1 games against each other, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon – with the most successful team overall taking the win (in this case it was the allies who achieved a 13-10 victory). The allies were made up of one British army, two American, and one Soviet; and the Axis had one Italian, and three German armies. Each player had put real effort into painting up their armies which made the day even more of a treat. There were four tables in total, a densely packed Pacific theatre 4x4 table, a 4x4 generic mainland Europe table, as well as a 6x4 Sicily table, and a 6x4 Normandy table kindly provided by one of the players participating, Kevin.
The Pacific Table Logan and I made was in the mix,
a really interesting tight map to play with a lot of terrain
In Bolt Action players allocate their resources (in this case, 800 points) to build their armies for the day, with options from inexperienced riflemen, through mortar teams, all the way to Super Heavy veteran tanks, meaning that no two armies were the same. To incentivise players to run the bigger, cooler, tanks which typically don’t get a lot of love, I decided to give a 30% discount off the price of heavy tanks, and a 15% discount off medium tanks – coupled with this, the player whose tank which was most effective on the day would score an additional three points for their team. Josh’s heavy tiger tank took out this award by a long shot, destroying seven units throughout the day.
There were some cool trophies up for grabs (in my opinion!)
Warlord Games (the creators of Bolt Action) came to the party too, providing prize support and ensuring that every participant received a blister pack of awesome metal models. Parker Hobbies provided a voucher to go alongside the trophy for the best painted army award which went to Dylan for his sweet North African British Force.
Dylan's award winning 8th Army British Force
Thank you to everyone who participated, and who helped with the organisation, I look forward to organising another similar event later this year!