Assorted Geekery

Saga – 28mm Skirmish Gaming

Saga is the new(ish) game on the block from Gripping Beast and Tomahawk studios. It pits small warbands against one another in the dark ages period, specifically 793 – 1066. We have had an eye on this for nearly a year now, and after seeing the Demo game at Salute 2012 we all decided to put our money down and buy a warband each.

This series details our groups efforts from making a snap decision at a wargames show – to actually playing the game .. or in the case of Alex, the journey of miniatures from a shelf on a stall at the show to the shelf in his flat, never once seeing the light of day 😛

OK so what attracted us to this game over all the other things we could have played

  • Achievable – The bar to entry is quite low, you can be up and running with a starter box of figures, dice and a rulebook for around £50, with not much expectation to spend any more.
  • Coffee Table sized – Until everyone’s living arrangements have settled down, its nice to have a game that can be played on a small table, and war-bands which can be transported easily. Saga seemed the ‘right’ size game to play.
  • Rules – the core rulebook is slim, and the rules felt ‘gamey’, with lots of tricks and options. Its not the shield-wall slugging match other (more historically accurate) systems try to simulate.

Rich and Tom picked up the Core rulebook .. and everyone picked a starter set

  • Tom – Vikings
  • Rich – Normans
  • James – Anglo-Danes
  • Lex – Jomsvikings

Tom also was lucky enough to scoop up the limited edition Skraeling starter box. We didn’t go for the Northern Fury expansion, thinking that we would see how we liked the core game before putting any more money down. Alex has agreed to field his Jomsvikings as regular vikings until we pick up Northern Fury.