All in the bones!

I dropped round to Rich's yesterday for a bit more SAGA action. Rich has blogged up a sterling battle report so I'm not going to go into the same level of detail but focus more on what I learnt and my developing impressions of the game individually and as a whole.

Playing Battle of the Fords it was fairly obvious after the terrain went down that it was effectively going to be two separate games on each flank and so it proved to be. As such deployment was going to be even more critical than usual and resulted in both of us loading our left flanks with both Warlords and their retinues as mobile reserve. This time I took the Anglo-Saxons to get some experience of their battle-board.

The left flank plus LONG-house

The right flank plus LONG-house

What became crucial during the game was the LONG-house on the Rich's Viking bank of the river. By entering and exiting it Rich was able to redeploy his lads much quicker than he could by foot and also use it as something of a bunker. Not a whinge, all entirely within the rules and I'm not looking to get into a debate about them BUT it did have a major effect on this particular game.

First clash results in.....

......a feast of crows!!

Getting first turn I took the game by the scruff and piled across both bridges. I made decent progress on the combining Gebur bowfire and Ceorl assault. On the right my sister Ceorls got caught stacked up on the bridge and were piled into by the Beserkers who promptly exploded yet again but this time taking all of my lads with them.

That would be one less SAGA dice each then. In fact that became another major feature of the game with both of us co-ordinating units to do our best to wipe out full units to get the knock on effect of reducing SAGA dice available to the other.

Left flank in the balance

My main assault on the left quickly became the main focus of the then game with the Vikings making repeated charges from their LONG-bunker. Dice, both SAGA and D6, ground me down at which point the Viking warlord delivered the telling blows and sent me scurrying back across the river. The lost units were bad enough but going donw toi 3 SAGA dice was crippling!

Following across the Viking Bondi were made to pay dearly loosing 3 of their number to my scabby Gebur bow. With numbers across the river scoring all the victory points Rich resisted the temptation to sudue them wary of any further casualties that they might inflict.

Right flank at the death!

On my right flank my own Warlord had similarly lead his Hearthgaurd through the defending Bondi who, through the battle-board, had exploded themself to maximise thier attacks. I had however used all my remaining SAGA dice to re-roll their saves and only a few fell.

Toting up the VPs Rich had more warriors across the river but mine were Hearthgaurd and scores were exactly tied! All those little errors and bits of luck throughout the game had proved crucial.

As much as we'd concentrated on using the battle-boards to the letter of the rules we'd still let each other off a number of technical errors as mates do. Not having to refer to the rule-book once this was my main learning point.

Rather like this one :)