SAGA Battle Royale: Spanish vs Crusaders vs Eastern Princes

Last weekend Mike, Stan and I got together to play some SAGA. (We had planned to play the weekend before but we decided to postpone because of the snow). Mike has already posted his battle report.

My Spanish force consisted of the warlord, 2 units of 4 hearthguard, 2 units of 8 mounted warriors, 1 unit of  8 foot warriors and 1 unit of 12 crossbow levy. I hadn't really thought about painting a Spanish force but the Spanish mounted warriors and crossbow levy can be in a Moorish force and I had the hearthguard that Ed had painted up long ago when we were going to do a Warhammer Ancients Battle El Cid campaign (a big part of my Saga Moors come from that project). It turned out that I had a big block painting the mounted warriors though. I started painting them just when the new SAGA came out last year and just finished them for this game (and they were sitting on my painting table for most of that time.

As we were starting to set up we realized that the terrain table for the multi-player games (which are played on a  4x6 table rather than usual 3x4) had more terrain types than the basic terrain table and so, naturally, Mike and Stan were demanding lakes and crevasses which I had not made in my terrain making frenzy over Christmas 

After we selected terrain that was actually available we set up. We didn't put a great deal of thought into the setup of either the terrain or our forces and we ended up with me on one side between some wood, Stan in the centre around the rocky hill and Mike in the corner.

The turn sequence of the Battle Royale scenario is quite clever. Each player starts with 6 tokens and when you take your turn you give up one token and then you pass the turn to the player with most tokens (and you can choose if there is more than one with the same number)

In the first few turns we did some manuevering. I got some good use of the Iberia ability which allows the Spanish Jinites (mounted warriors) to react to an enemy movement or shooting to move or shoot (and it is a basic ability so you can put multiple dice on it.

Mike moved a force on my left which did some damage to my but it was isolated enough that I could gang up on it and wipe it out with no further loss to myself

There were no clear sides in the fighting in the centre with everyone attacking everyone else. I probably got involved a bit more closely than I should and took some losses (but so did everyone else)

On the second last turn I used the Jinites! ability which allows a unit of Jinites (no surprise there) to activate as many times as you want (it still suffers fatigue for each activation) and reduces the armour of all its shooting targets by one -- you can only shoot each target once in the turn though. I did quite a bit of damage to both Mike and Stan with this but I didn't get far enough away at the end so Mike managed to catch and kill the exhausted unit. It was quite a fun exchange of Saga abilities and fatigue discarding since Mike had an ability which added the attack dice of another unit (in this case, his Warlord) and I had an ability that removed all his attack dice (Treachery) and it would be better for me if he played his first (it worked out the other way in this case).

The victory points were based on Survival points and Stan had quite a bit more left than Mike or I so he was declared the winner.

My warlord survived the game (which is unusual for me) and I really enjoyed the Spanish board. If I were going to play again I would take 2 units of Hearthguard again but go for 4 units of Jinetes. Since I had such a struggle painting them this time, I probably won't be rushing into actually doing that any time soon.

The Battle Royale scenario worked really well and I will certainly play it again (and who knows, maybe I will have made lakes and crevasses by then)

Lion Rampant: A belated AAR

Last month, Stan and Mike came over for a game of Lion Rampant and of Frostgrave and I am finally getting around to making a post for it (Mike was much more timely with his description of the battle)

We had been considering putting on a Crusades game at Cangames with the Lion Rampant rule and this seemed like a good time to give them a try. Mike and I had both read the rules but no one had done any real prep work (like army lists or that sort of thing). We decided we would go for 12 points a side with the Crusader army divided in 2 with 2 commander (only one of which would be active on any given turn)

My force consisted of  2 mounted Serjeants with bows, 2 units of mounted yeoman and 2 units of foot yeoman. The crusaders had (I think) one unit of Knights and one of Crossbow and then a bunch of heavy foot.

My initial plan was to harass the crusader infantry with bow fire while avoiding the knights. This plan would have worked better if I had realized (or read) that the mounted yeomen also had bows.

I ended up getting caught in various melees which I lost, partly because I was outclassed but also because my rolls in combat were pretty poor -- I think I made nearly every command roll though

The battle continued in this vein, I became a bit more effective with the bows as I came to grips with the rules but the crusaders kept the upper hand.  I don't really remember any of the details so I will just present the rest of the pictures I took

In the end it was a fun game but the rules were a bit too simple and the special rules for each unit type weren't so special (in the way the "useful rules" in Hail Caesar can really help to add character to a different troop type).  We seemed to be in agreement that for smaller 2 player games, SAGA is much more fun (though more complicated) and if we were going to be playing a bigger game, Hail Caesar would have been the way to go. There are some good features to the rules and it wouldn't be too hard to make special rules for each unit without going overboard. The "boasts" were you get victory points for performing some act of daring are quite good.


I think the rules would be really good for a con, they are simple and mostly intuitive. After playing them I had some ideas of what I would like to do at Cangames but a week or so later, I was convinced that what I really wanted to do was run a Roman game (using Hail Caesar) at Cangames so that is the current plan!

We also played a game of Frostgrave which turned out really well, probably the best game of that so far but for some reason my camera was set for really long exposures and all my pictures ended up as blurs. (We are also going to run that at Cangames)