battle report

All posts tagged battle report

Age of Fantasy: The Ravening Hordes

Posted by Comrade on November 16, 2021
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 10 Comments

Earlier this month we gathered in John’s garage war room to cross swords with Age of Fantasy, the rules-lite iteration of classic fantasy wargaming from One Page Rules.

Given how much we enjoyed last month’s outing with Grimdark Future: Firefight last month, it seemed like a logical progression to explore Age of Fantasy. As the name implies, Age of Fantasy is a slimmed-down ruleset that supports Warhammer-lite gameplay, with nifty army lists approximating all the major races and factions from the classic tabletop game. As a bonus, it also includes rules and army lists for most of the newer factions from Age of Sigmar, if that’s your cup o’ tea.

For our game, we set up a 2-vs-1 match whereupon John and Vince combined their human and dwarven forces to take on my bloodthirsty chaos army. This was my first time getting my entire chaos army on the table since I began piecing it together a year or two ago, and I was really chomping at the bit to lay it all out there on the table and bask in the blood-soaked glory.

Please indulge, if you will, these photos of my seething chaos battle line as it took to the field.

John’s human forces and Vincent’s dwarven milita were similarly arrayed, though I noted a concerning lack of skulls and spikes on their side of the board, as well as 100% more pegasus knights and bear riders.

We set up 5 objectives per the standard scenario in the rulebook. I wrote “rulebook” but One Page Rules is not joking about its name; the core rules for Age of Fantasy occupy less than two letter-sized pages, with the full rulebook encompassing scarcely more than a dozen.

The rules are spare, but they do a great job capturing the flavor and tone of a typical game of Warhammer. You’re still rolling dice and counting bonuses and removing casualties and cursing the gods when things go terribly awry, but Age of Fantasy seems to strip away a lot of the bloat that plagued most modern editions of Warhammer.

And so, amid the clatter of spears and the scrape of boiled leather, our game got underway. We opted to use the “Ebb and Flow” rules for the turn sequence, meaning we put a number of colored poker chits equal to the number of units in our armies into a sack, then took turns drawing a chit to determine unit activation order each turn. It was great fun, but it also set up some high stakes moments, because when one side sees several of their chits come up in a row, they know that means the opposing player will have a series of unopposed activations coming later in the turn.

With bloodlust in my eyes, I sent my forces surging forward.

Did I mention I had zero ranged combat in my army? It was all melee, so the only direction to go was forward.

On the right flank, a unit of Putrid Blightkings plodded through the muck, churning the soil beneath their steel-shod feet/hooves. They seized the first objective: a recently abandoned campsite with a roast pheasant still sizzling on the spit. This hapless game hen would become the focal point of absolutely insane butchery as the game unfolded.

With a little help from my chaos sorceress, I managed to goad my unit of Centigors into charging a unit of crossbowmen that had just finished unleashing their arrows into the flanks of my chaos knights. The Centigors thundered in amid a storm of hooves and spears, laying waste to the crossbowmen …

…before finding themselves on the receiving end of a devastating counter-charge from John’s winged pegasus knights!

Nothing like a good ol’ charge/counter-charge bloodbath.

As these maneuvers were playing out, we again remarked on how Age of Fantasy captured the spirit and general gameplay mechanics of classic Warhammer. Sure, we weren’t flipping through army books and cross-referencing arcane rule interactions, but the general spirit of the game definitely emerged as block of troops wheeled and charged and fell back.

By this point, we were about two turns into the game, and the chaos cavalry was advancing up the left flank to menace the dwarf handgunners. The center of the battlefield was dominated by several units of Vince’s heavily armored dwarves, backed up by a fearsome artillery piece.

Over at Waypoint Pheasant (the campfire objective marker featuring the oversized chicken tenders), John was making a determined defense with his block of 20 spearmen, led by the inimitable Grand Marshal Bartholomieu Begovic (standing tall on his ubiquitous supply crate).

The spearmen had a special ability that allowed them to inflict fierce casualties whenever they receive a charge, which really had me scratching my head about how to crack this particular nut.

Ultimately, I had to commit three units to the fight in order to pry John’s spearmen off this particular objective. The final sledgehammer came in the form of a devastating charge by my chariot, which circled around and took the hedgehog on its flank. (Age of Fantasy doesn’t have unit facings, so flank charges exist only in my imagination, but it seemed fitting here.)

The arrival of the chariot tipped things in my favor. A series of spectacularly poor morale rolls from John resulted in Marshal Begovic fleeing the field with the surviving spearmen! Discretion was the better part of valor, it seems, and our dear Marshal didn’t wish the get bloodstains on his pantaloons.

The Ebb and Flow activation rules we were using for this game continued to present unexpected and extremely fun decision points. Both sides had the opportunity to pull off “combo activations” to push the advantage. By the end of the second turn, repeated ativations by the chaos army had finally seized the initiative, culminating in this devastating charge by the chaos knights against the surviving members of a dwarf handgunner brigade.

The demise of the handgunners meant that there wasn’t much to stop the knights from rolling into the dwarves’ backfield, slaughtering the artillery crew and disrupting the reserves that were waiting to plug the gap in the main battleline.

We concluded that the game was in the bag for me, and the two allied players wisely decided to quit the field and retreat to their strongholds.

Age of Fantasy provided a great game worthy of the history books (for me, anyway, since I was the victor). It is a very playable, rules-lite game which seems like it can easily accommodate some very large armies without a lot of complexity or rulebook flipping.

The Ebb & Flow activation rules (optional in the Age of Fantasy rulebook) were absolutely electrifying. I understand they also form the core mechanics for games like Bolt Action and Warlords of Erehwon.

By the end of the game, we were already sketching out ideas for larger games featuring more gloriously painted miniatures from our collections. Stay tuned for more!

War of the Coins: Duel on the Borderlands

Posted by Comrade on September 11, 2020
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 9 Comments

Last month John and I gathered for a somewhat momentous game of Saga: Age of Magic. At long last, after plenty of worldbuilding and painting, we were beginning a narrative campaign set in my club’s homebrew fantasy world. Specifically, we’d be playing out a series of games during the War of the Coins, a particularly devastating conflict between a wealthy dwarven empire and a loose alliance of feudal human noble houses.

We knew from our worldbuilding efforts (guided by the excellent Microscope RPG) that the decade-long War of the Coins ended with the dwarves being defeated after a great siege at their capital city, and summarily expelled from the continent and sent packing over a land bridge into an icy, windswept wasteland. But while the outcome was predetermined, we were very eager to play out a series of games to determine the exact nature of the dwarves’ defeat and the humans’ triumphs.

The conflict was named after the vast amounts money (coins) spent by the human feudal states in hiring mercenaries to fight on their behalf. It was also so named for the round shields carried by the stout dwarf warriors into battle. As the war progressed, the hard-pressed dwarves took to hammering copper coins into their oaken shields. So the name works on several levels!

The game took place outdoors, on John’s covered patio, with masks and plenty of physical distancing. I was running my dwarf army using the Masters of the Underearth battle board, and John was using the Great Kingdoms list for his human militia.

In the War of the Coins, the dwarves were the aggressors, launching several border raids that culminated in a full-blown invasion of the human city-states. Our game took place in Drazenko, a border outpost controlled by one of the minor human princes. John’s faction, House Begovic, had selected Drazenko as the first location to oppose the the dwarves’ advance.

As the game began, the dwarf army had just succeeded in pounding Drazenko with long-range cannon fire, reducing much of the village to rubble and clearing the way for the dwarven advance. The dwarf king Nicodemus II, the Anvil of Dawn, had taken to the field to lead his army into the village in what everyone assumed would be a low-stakes mopping up action. Good for propaganda, especially if the king was careful to get a bit of dust on his cloak as he strode through the streets.

King Nicodemus II, the Anvil of Dawn, leans smartly on his shield as a signals a general advance into Drazenko.

Unfortunately, House Begovic had other ideas. Mobile reserves arrived to challenge the dwarves as they marched triumphantly into the smoking ruins of Drazenko.

John’s army was well organized and (thanks to several mounted units) quite speedy. He was able to blunt my initial advance quite handily. Within a few turns, the dwarves hadn’t been able to move very far into the ruined village.

John’s opening turn was brilliant; he managed to get his paladin into combat with my frost giant, and actually killed the blue-skinned monster in a single combat! Talk about a huge blow to morale … it died without ever activating!

With my preferred avenue of advance closed to me, I fell back on that tried-and-true dwarf tactic: close ranks and prepare a stout defense. John’s units had the mobility to surround my force on two sides, but I’m pleased to say that I proved to be a tough nut to crack for most of the game.

An early win came when my two cannons succeeded in knocking out his catapult. These units had been conducting a long-range artillery duel for the first few turns of the game. With the catapult out of the way, the cannons were free to rain fire down on virtually any target on the battlefield. Fire at will!

Back in the center of the battlefield, the dwarves stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they weathered devastating charges by John’s mounted heroes. Dwarves fell by the score, but they managed to take a few humans with them … just enough to prevent the game turning into a total and complete rout.

It was clear that I was not going to be able to pull off the victory, but once again Saga provided a fairly close game once all the victory conditions were calculated. This is a game that rewards players who pay close attention to the parameters for winning.

One key play that kept me in the game in the latter turns came when the cannons managed to land two shells in the vicinity of Field Marshal Bartholomieu Begovic, peppering the well-heeled noble with shrapnel and forcing him to retire to the rear to recuperate with a strong cup of brandy while an attaché documented his heroism in a letter sent back to the home front.

But back on the front lines, where warriors were fighting and dying, it was anything but glorious. Drazenko was a smoking ruin of churned mud and shattered masonry, strewn with the bodies of the dead and wounded. The dwarves were pressed back as House Begovic’s pegasus cavalry flew in to cut down the cannon crew, effectively silencing the big guns.

At this point, we had reached our turn limit, which meant that King Nicodemus was able to quit the field with some dignity intact, having been stung badly by his first encounter with House Begovic.

As we counted up victory points, we found that the game wasn’t a total rout for me, so that was nice. John has a very good handle on how to play the Great Kingdoms battle board, and his army list is versatile and well tuned. For my part, my list wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be (due to painting queue obligations) so I had a bit of work still to do.

I also decided that I wanted to go all in on the “big guns never tire” theme for my army. So in addition to my two static war machines, I’ll be taking two destruction teams (to be represented by some multi-barrel organ guns I have in my collection) to really max out of the number of shooty stuff on my side of the board. Thankfully, Saga is versatile enough to allow me to achieve this goal in short order.

Now that the War of the Coins has begun, we can’t stop now! Let’s see what King Nicodemus has in mind for his next move. And how bold will Field Marshal Bartholomieu Begovic be when he returns, refreshed and healed, to resume his command? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for more!

Saga: Age of Magic – The Plague Caravan

Posted by Comrade on July 27, 2020
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments

Earlier this month, John and I dared to play a game of Saga: Age of Magic on his back porch. We had physical distancing and a nice breeze, as well as face masks for both of us, so we felt that we had taken all reasonable precautions. After a long drought, we were excited to get some newly painted miniatures onto the battlefield, both for John’s Great Kingdoms army and my Masters of the Underearth (Skaven) warband.

The game was a follow-on to the outcome of our previous game, which saw a rout by a ratmen raiding party harrying the defenders of a fortified village. For this game, the ratmen had secured a slightly more … pungent … booty, in the form of three rotting coffins, each containing the noisome remains of a plague victim. The ratmen were scurrying off with the caskets so that their crazed alchemists could use the bodies to brew up some dastardly poisons. Only the stout defenders of House Begovic stood between the ratmen and their goal!

You can see the caskets, being borne by a swarm of rats, in the photo above. The goal was to escort them across the battlefield and exit through John’s table edge. I’d have to keep moving at a pretty good clip to ensure a reasonable chance of winning. No dithering and no time wasted on fruitless combat!

After deployment, I committed most of my forces to the right flank, as seen in the photo above. I was trying to stay as far away as possible from John’s unit of mounted hearthguard. At eight strong, they were an incredibly powerful and hard-hitting force on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the best I could do was delay their arrival.

So I started maneuvering away from them, angling up the right flank and positioning some of my ratmen as blocking units to slow down the attackers. It worked! For a couple of turns, anyway. My newly painted levies with bows occupied this encampment, staying in cover and delivering fairly effective missile fire throughout the game.

Likewise, this unit of levies shadowed the hearthguard on the opposing flank, always threatening to burst from cover and poke the cavalry with their spears. They actually jumped into combat toward the end of the game and, I think, inflicted some casualties!

The caskets moved slowly, and I had to keep the rest of my force arrayed around them to provide a support. It was only a matter of time before John’s hearthguard caught up to them and surged in for a massive assault.

Oh look! There it is. CHARGE!

The charge wiped out an entire unit of warriors that had been protecting the caskets, leaving the poor little rat swarms dangerously exposed to the thundering hooves of the hearthguard. On my turn, I got incredibly lucky with a pair of quadrupedal creatures, which managed to annihilate about half of the horsemen in a single savage round of attacks.

That combat tilted the game in my favor, at least temporarily.

The quadrupedal creatures are Chaos Centigors from Warhammer Fantasy. I love the miniatures and figured I’d get them onto the battlefield alongside my Skaven. After all, why do we play Saga if not for opportunities to mix and match miniatures from our collections?

After that, the game became a rat race — no pun intended. I had pushed through the initial battle line (at great cost) and now had a slim chance to make a break for John’s table edge.

Unfortunately, my rat swarms were mauled and nearing exhaustion. John still had several highly mobile units that were ultimately able to chase them down and skewer the poor rats one by one. Oh well! I take heart in the knowledge that John’s surviving warriors caught the plague and died horribly after the battle was won.

This game represented a personal best for me in terms of rules comprehension and overall grasp of strategy and tactics. Saga is a really complex game, with a lot of decisions to be made at various points throughout the turn. Playing against a worthy opponent like John requires the utmost attention to detail! I am getting better with the Masters of the Underearth army. I intend to use the same army list for my dwarf army, which will be helpful for digging deeper into the tactics of this particular army. We’re playing again soon — stay tuned for more!

Zona Alfa: Kicking the Hornet’s Nest

Posted by Comrade on January 31, 2020
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , . 1 Comment

The gang got together earlier this month for our first game of Zona Alfa, the new Stalker-inspired post-apocalyptic skirmish game from Osprey. (Click here to read my review of Zona Alfa.)

What started out as a simple introductory game quickly swelled to a two-on-two team slugfest, as players signed on with their scrappy crews, lured by the promise of illicit salvage in the eponymous Exclusion Zone. I rode herd on this motley assemblage as impartial (some would say sinister) gamemaster. I was pleased to get such a robust turnout for this game. Here’s a goofy photo as we prepared to brave the dangers of the Zone.

Zona Alfa draws inspiration from the crumbling, abandoned Cold War industrial heaps that you might find in the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Players muster crews of stalkers, scavengers, and mercenaries and pit them against similarly motivated bands on the battlefield. But the Zone itself plays a huge role in each game … Zone hostiles can appear at any moment, and the very environment itself can suddenly erupt in violent fashion.

Narrative gaming is the heart and soul of Zona Alfa. For our games, we decided that the crews had heard a rumor of an abandoned supply truck parked in the shadow of the Khimbruk Electrochemical Combine, located about a mile inside the perimeter of the Zone. Surrounded by the decaying detritus of the derelict factory, the cargo truck promised a payday of salvage, loot, and more. Here’s a look at the objective.

It’s just right there, for the taking. Yeah, right…

I created some basic starting crews for the players, and then we got started. We set up a 4×4 foot table, slightly larger than the 3×3 size recommended in the rulebook, due to our surplus of players. Each side alternated by activating one figure, performing actions, and then passing play to the opposing team. The first couple of turns were focused on learning the basic game system and moving out of our deployment areas. But before too long, the players got close enough to begin exchanging some ranging volleys of automatic rifle fire as they slipped through the ruins.

We placed three hot spots on the battlefield, in addition to the main mission objective, for a total of four focal points for game action. Hot spots (and the mission objective) trigger Zone hostiles when figures get close enough (typically within 6 inches), but Zona Alfa includes a mechanic to allow players to toss bolts or rocks to trigger hot spots from up to 18 inches away. This is a mechanic that come straight out of the Stalker video game, and it gives players the chance to exploit hot spots from afar and then watch gleefully as their opponent dealt with the ensuing bad guys.

The first hot spot yielded a pack of wild dogs that had spent a little too much time digging through the radioactive slag pile behind the electrochemical plant. They were a ghastly bunch, snarling and covered in bleeding sores. Dan’s troopers paused in their advance and expertly gunned them down.

From there, the game developed into a series of running gun battles as the players lobbed grenades and laid down overlapping fire to cover their advance. John’s crew triggered the next hot spot and was able to take cover in a ruined building as a mob of giant rats scampered toward them.

Here’s another look at the battlefield a couple turns into the game.

Lawrence found himself pinned down by accurate fire from Mark’s band of mostly rookie snipers. He kept his guys in cover and advanced slowly, but Mark was able to toss a bolt and trigger a hot spot, which sent a mob of horrifying zombies shambling down the street towards Lawrence’s dangerously exposed leader.

We found that the rules for Zone hostiles were satisfying but not overly oppressive. This was probably because we were playing at Zone Threat Level 1, the “easiest” setting in the game. As you get closer to the Zone’s enigmatic center, the threats become much more dangerous. Near the perimeter, the Zone hostiles were just a nuisance. But those zombies definitely tied up Lawrence’s leader for a good portion of the game!

Elsewhere on the battlefield, savvy players were using the distraction provided by the Zone hostiles to move forward and secure other objectives. When a figure searches a hot spot, the player rolls randomly to see what has been uncovered. Often it’s salvage worth cold, hard cash outside the Zone, but occasionally you’ll run across equipment or other gear.

Here’s John’s hardened scavenger moving in to search a decommissioned air compressor next to a derelict pumping station.

Likewise, Dan wisely looted this rusted generator, stripping off any useable parts and bagging them up to be hauled back to civilization. His exploration roll resulted in an anomaly — a strange electromagnetic (or was it supernatural?) disturbance that, in this case, disintegrated his hapless trooper. Better luck next time, comrade.

The final clash of the game came when Dan’s crew approached the supply truck during a lull in the fighting. As his poor (doomed) trooper crept closer, the bandits that had been hiding in the rear of the truck sprang their trap, dropping the tailgate and coming out with AK-74s blazing. This was the result of a particularly potent roll on the Zone hostiles table. The bandits took out the trooper, then began blasting in all directions as the other crews closed in.

As the players began to strategize a way to neutralize the scavengers, Dan took it upon himself to deliver the coup de grace. His leader climbed onto the catwalk of the nearby electrochemical factory and tossed a grenade right into the midst of the bandits. Problem solved, comrade.

After that, we tallied up our loot totals and performed the after-action stuff for crew members who had been knocked out during the game. Zona Alfa has a nicely developed campaign system where players can track the acquisition of loot as well as the inevitable degradation of your crew, as repeated forays into the Zone start to take their toll on even the hardest soldier. Best to dismiss such unfortunate souls from your crew and bring on fresh recruits, if you want my advice.

The gameplay of Zona Alfa was easy to pick up after a couple turns. We loved the simplicity of the activation system, and how the Zone hostiles system scales with the overall Threat Level of the game. Basically, those same zombies will be a lot more menacing when you encounter them at Threat Level 3, instead of Threat Level 1. Overall, the mechanics were best described by one of the players as a “toolkit approach,” where the author provides a solid core rules engine with the implicit idea that players will tack on house rules and put their own spin on the game as time goes on. Despite being a casual playgroup, we were still able to punch a few holes in the rules as written and find some loopholes that could be exploited. Again, that’s easy enough handle, but groups should discuss their expectations and approach at the outset, to ensure a fun experience for everyone.

We all agreed that Zona Alfa is a superb catalyst for building terrain, painting up some fun, tacti-cool squads of Cold War antiheroes, and playing out some pitch-perfect adventures in the Zone. We’ll play this one again soon!

Saga: Age of Magic – Famine Grips the Land

Posted by Comrade on January 3, 2020
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

With the arrival of 2020 comes a renewed focus on gaming some fantasy battles in Üthdyn, our homebrew fantasy setting. To kick-start this process, John and I got together in the waning days of December to play Saga: Age of Magic, which is quickly becoming our go-to ruleset for generic, narrative fantasy wargaming.

We set this game during The Famines, a period of Üthdyn’s history when crop failures swept the land and highwaymen and raiders preyed on the isolated settlements on the borders of Muratollnic (our Eastern Europe analog region, with lots of little feudal states jammed side-by-side in a volatile and claustrophobic relationship).

The instability caused by The Famines gave rise to opportunistic attacks by ratmen warriors that lived in the mountains surrounding Muratollnic. What began as a raid on the soggy hamlet of Glodd soon gave rise to pitched battles, as a swollen army of hungry ratmen warriors marched down from the mountains. Eventually the rats battled their way into the outskirts of Drazenko, one of many similarly sized holdings on the western borders of Muratollnic.

This battle represents a defense by Wealth Begovic, one of the most influential factions in the region, as it musters a stout militia to stand against the ratmen. We set the game in an urban area at the point where the ratmen advance reached the Begovic defenders.

OK, is that enough background for you? Sometimes I get carried away, but I really like giving a little narrative flavor to my games. Plus we’ve collectively put a lot of creativity our Üthdyn setting!

For this game, John was running his human army using the Great Kingdoms battle board, and I was fielding my Skaven ratmen using the Masters of the Underearth battle board.

We were playing the “Feasting and Pillaging” scenario from the Saga: Age of Battles book. The scenario called for three objective markers placed in a line in the center of the battlefield, equidistant from the two armies’ deployment zones. We used wooden barrels to represent the objectives, reasoning that they represented much-needed food stores that the citizens of Drazenko desperately needed to see themselves through the winter. We set up our cool toys, introduced them to each other, and got started with the battle.

I realized almost immediately that I had made a fatal flaw in my army’s design. I had gotten enamored with the variety of oddball support units available to the Masters of the Underearth, and consequentially I had forgotten to include enough core units to generate the all-important Saga dice that are used to activate units and use Saga abilities.

John was able to muster 6 Saga dice with his army, whereas I could only muster 4 Saga dice. Oops! So I was a bit hamstrung from the start.

With that said, I proceeded gamely, and actually managed a nifty maneuver on the opening turn. The Masters of the Underearth have this cool ability called Chasm that allows them to open up a rift in the earth near the opposing army. Depending on the proximity to the Chasm, nearby units might take casualties. The Chasm ability is very hard to pull off because it requires a very specific set of Saga dice results.

As luck would have it (possibly my last luck of the game?), I was able to activate Chasm on my first turn, before John had even had a chance to move! I dropped the Chasm marker (we used a jagged piece of rock ripping up through the ground) right in front of his army, in the area it was probably looking forward to moving through on his first turn.

The Chasm immediately threw John’s careful deployment into disarray. He had to basically scatter his guys to avoid falling into the gaping pit. In doing so, he lost some (but not all) of the cohesiveness and overlapping benefits of his army. Through careful maneuvering, he was able to avoid any casualties related to the Chasm.

After that, things settled down a bit. No more Chasms for me! In fact, I found myself suffering each turn due to a lack of Saga dice. This forced tough decisions about which units to activate and which units to leave stationary.

Those three barrels were calling to us, though. By moving through the buildings that lined the perimeter of the town, I was able to knock my team into a loose skirmish line as we approached the central objective. Unfortunately, John’s hearthguard (hard-hitting veterans, always good in a scrap) got there first, seizing the barrel and presenting me with a wall of spears and shields as the rats approached.

While this was happening, a lone squad of rat warriors was sneaking up to a barrel on the left flank. John had several units garrisoned in a building nearby, and they fired off some ineffectual arrows as the ratmen closed in. This was to be my only swipe at victory, as I didn’t get close enough to any of the other barrels in this game.

You can almost hear the chaotic din of the battle taking place behind these guys. Glorious!

Sidenote: We were both really pleased with how Saga handles buildings. Most skirmish and army-level games I’ve played tend to ignore buildings, or treat them as generic cover. Saga adds a few more thoughtful rules that encouraged the use of buildings, particularly moving into them and gaining some marginal benefits.

On the other flank, John’s mounted hearthguard (again, a tough nut to crack) closed in on the other barrel with frightening speed. I tried putting a ratling gun (destruction team, in the parlance of Saga: Age of Magic) in their way, and the gun caused a couple casualties, but the rats were ultimately destroyed in a stampede of hoofs and slashing swords.

You can see the barrel just behind the surviving horsemen. Hearthguard are one of the few units in the game that continue to generate Saga dice irrespective of how many casualties they’ve taken. So while I definitely piled on the punishment against these horsemen, I wasn’t able to annihilate them entirely — and thus they continued to generate Saga dice and contribute to John’s tactical advantage over the course of the game.

Meanwhile, the scrap in the center of the table was heating up. Once he secured the supply barrel, John began a slow retreat with his hearthguard. I tried to thwart that as best I could by charging his hearthguard repeatedly with various packs of frenzied rat creatures!

Alas, the hearthguard did what they did best, by withstanding the worst of the brutality and continuing their slow, plodding retreat. With a few more Saga dice, I think I could have hampered his strategy a bit more effectively. As it was, he had enough supporting units nearby to facilitate a tactical withdrawal even as I nipped at his heels.

One last interesting tactical situation arose as the game was nearing its final turns. Over on the right flank, John’s mounted hearthguard had succeeded in snagging the other barrel, but only after suffering some serious casualties. With just one horseman left, I realized that I had a decent chance of blasting it to pieces with my zany shooting units (including a Doomwheel and my chittering rat alchemist). Both were able to get in range in the final turn, thanks to some careful maneuvering and use of magic spells.

Alas, even with some nifty Saga abilities to help my shooting, the pesky hearthguard survived and retained the supply barrel. Argh! I gave it my best shot(s), but those hearthguard are just so damned … hard!

And with that, the game was over. We actually scored using both on-table objectives and “survival points” for units that survived the game. Taken together, John won handily.

I should note that my last-ditch ranged combat ploy required the use of every single Saga die that I was able to generate that turn! All of that, just for the ability to move and fire … two units. Everything else in my army was forced to remain stationary. This really drove home my comprehension of the value of Saga dice and how they are generated.

Upon review, John’s strategy of sending his hearthguard at the objectives while everything else played supporting roles turned out to be the correct play. The hearthguard were few in number, but once they got in position, they were very difficult to budge. My own Saga dice deficiency really amplified the impact of his hearthguard when I could not manage to string together a way to stop them.

Once again Saga gave us a fun and fairly well balanced game. I’m really enjoying the narrative that we’re building here, with the ratmen gnawing at the perimeter of Drazenko while the Begovic defenders seem, at least for the time being, to be able to stop their advance. Let’s see where this one goes in the future!