Saga

Today our queen abdicated and our new king took office. We decided to spend part of this national day off playing Saga.

Saga is a Dark Ages skirmish wargame pitting various factions of the viking era (ca. 800 - 1066) against each other. Today saw the Anglo-Danes facing the legendary or perhaps even mythical Jomsvikings.

It had been awhile since I last played Saga but have since expanded my Anglo-Danes to a 6 point warband. Unfortunately, I didn't get to use these new troops. My opponent hadn't played before and was using his Confrontation Drune models as Jomsvikings. This meant we opted to play a 4 point Clash of Warlords.

When I first studied the Jomsviking battleboard I thought they were somewhat overpowered and I expected to struggle against them, especially since they could quite easily neutralize the main strengths of the Anglo-Danish, which is inflicting Fatigue and grinding the enemy up in melees.
Hanging back and waiting for them to come, just gives them a chance to inflict casualties on your warband or raise their Wrath, which poweres their most powerful abilities.

Since the Anglo-Danes have no cavalry and I don't own any missile troops for them, it would be difficult to avoid a straight slug fest between two pretty similar forces.
This turned out to be largely true, I realised hanging back and slowly inflicting Fatigue on the opposing units wasn't going to work, so I resolved to just close the distance quickly. This meant the warbands met pretty much in the middle of the table with the Jomsvikings able to make the first charge.

In the end I managed to gain a slight advantage after the first melees, which allowed me to outmanoeuvre the Jomsviking and isolate their warlord. Once, isolated he fell prey to a joint charge by my warlord and 4 Hearthguard.

While I won in the end, I think this was largely due to the inexperience of my opponent, who possibly could have used his battle board to greater effect.
However, I no longer think the Jomsvikings are overpowered. Most of their abilities can be cancelled by giving them Wrath, which makes it hard to formulate strategy. They also have no access to cavalry, or archers, nor to cheap levies.

All in all an interesting game and I think I'll need to get me same levies armed with missile weapons...