Friday 25 November 2011

First Look: Saga

So after picking up the rules for Saga at the Derby show back in October myself and Lee finally managed to slot a game into our busy gaming calendar, and this is what we thought of it,

Gameplay:

Rules wise its very simple with the battleboard being the key to your faction, think of it like warmachine where you have your abilities that your able to use each turn, you also activate and do a units move/shoot/melee all in one go however with Saga you roll a certain amount of Saga dice depending on how many units you've got on the table and depending what you roll will depend on what you can activate or abilities your can use for that turn. So it can be a bit random but it makes getting combo's off really good and each faction has a different style of play.

( as we're still waiting for the "special" dice to come from gripping beast I knocked some up with a downloadable PDF from the forums )

The other aspect of the game that sets it apart from others that we've played was the fatigue, in a nutshell you can activate your units more than once (if your roll good enough on your saga dice) but you wear them down and once your in combat your opponent can use your fatigue to reduce your armour or increase his and other bits and bobs, so again another nice touch that we liked.

Combat gives you an interesting angle, you can take attack dice and allocate them to help roll additional saves or just go hell for leather and try and slice and dice them! 

Models:

I got the viking starter set and it gave me a 4 point raiding party, the models are not too bad, fairly simple to paint and if you wanted there are enough manufatuers of 28mm dark age models so that your could have a real personalised looking force.With this being a skirmish game your don't need that many around the 35 mark will give you a fairly decent sized warband, some games I've played that's one bloody unit!

Lastability:

I like this quite a bit and so can see me playing this alongside cutlass quite alot, I played a 4 point game and even with trying to suss out the rules we were done and dusted within a couple of hours. We have both Nick & Coops watching and by the end of it they knew pretty much what was going on.

The only point that Lee would like to see is some kind of campaign system where your warlord and normal guys get better, but after some brain storming the only system that I know of that has unit advances is mordhiem and with a little jigging about you could bring that into your games, but saying that there are quite a few scenarios that can be played so plenty to keep you going.

So onto tonight's game...

4 points aside, Vikings up against Anglo-Danish














The classic set up! meet you in the middle...














The viking line.














the Anglo line, Lee's managed to get his force painted before his first game, he also managed to do the same for cutlass and this is the only time in all the years I've known his to ever achieve that!! but that's army dip for you eh! ;) 















So my first turn nothing fancy, just charge, I double activated the berserkers on my right flank to see how Lee would react, 














a unit of Lee's Hearthguard broke the shield wall and we soon discovered how good combat was with them going down after a couple of round of combat, at this point we discovered that the warlord can activate for free and any one unit within 4" can also be activated for free.... my hulk hogan impressions were soon to be short lived.... 














and with a counter charge he went down like a sack of spuds!  His body guard getting wiped out and taking two wounds he was outta there!!














and how it finished, my left flank was kicking ass, and nothing was left of the Anglo's and the right flank the beserkers were mooching about waiting for the right moment... its all kicked off in the centre though,














And funnily enough Lee likes this system as he's "kicked my ass" (again) but I'll be back Upton..... 


















Neither of us had any missile troops and that's the next bits we'll be picking up along side Nick going for Norman's on horse back it's looks like Saga is here to stay!

Now only of they did a Samurai version.....

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