Order Dice are a key feature to Bolt Action and I feel
worthy of a single post dedicated to this aspect of the rules.
Unlike other games where you roll and then you play the game
“I go/You go” or roll each turn to see who takes the lead taking all their
actions at once, while some games have other random mechanics on who goes first
but Bolt Action has a great mechanic called Order Dice.
Simply put, you get one die per unit. So, if you have 10
American units vs. 8 German Units, there would be 18 dice in play roughly. 10
indicate the American Units and 8 for the Germans. You draw each dice from a
bag/cup/box to determine who gets to select a unit to activate and give orders
to. This creates a situation where it could be anyone’s game as to who would go
next on the next dice draw.
As units are removed from play you also must remove one die
from the dice pool to show the loss of that unit and having less tactical input.
There are several options for Order Dice and Tokens:
Warlord makes their own dice specific to the game but are
very costly as you will more than likely need two packs if you go beyond 10
dice for your army. Thus costing you between $20-25 bucks for two sets of dice
depending on the discount you can get from some sites.
Bolt Action Order Dice (more colors are on the way)
You could just simply use two sets of dice of different
colors that are the same size. They have to of course be the same size
otherwise it would be easy to know which dice is yours and ruins the random element
of the game. By placing the die face up on the # that associates to your order
you wish to give your unit in the game.
Examples of same sized dice you could use.
1 Fire (no
move, shoot only with fewer penalties)
2 Advance
(move and fire, has penalties for moving while shooting)
3 Run (no
shooting, double move)
4 Ambush (Hold
your action, saving it for later use)
5 Rally (no
move or shoot, you remove pin markers)
6 Down (no
move or shoot, you are hugging dirt to avoid injury)
If you opt to use your own dice there is several ways to
mark units orders or in game markers like Pinning using poker chips for example
or ordering your own custom markers from companies like Litko for example.
There is also this great site; they made paper markers for
use with Bolt Action. Print them out and make your own tokens if you are the
do-it-yourselfer type.
http://thehobbystudios.com/index.php?p=11_2
Good review!
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