So yesterday, I found myself leaving home at 6.55am to drive to Exeter to play SAGA at the Legionary show staged by the Exmouth Wargames Club. Despite being a bank holiday weekend the A303 wasn't too bad and I made good time, arriving in around 2 hours from my home near to Devizes in Wiltshire. With my newly painted Vikings ready for action it was appropriate that the podcast I decided to listen too was mostly about Vikings and the exhibition currently running at the British Museum.
It was a small competition with just six of us playing.
My first game was against a very kind opponent called David who was using Welsh. He was kind as he explained much about the game after I had told him I have only ever played three games over a two year period, using a different army each time, and losing all of them.
So how would the Vikings do against Welsh? Not an force I knew anything much about and I'd not even looked at the SAGA battle boards for anything other than Vikings or Normans before the weekend. Normans as that was an army I have painted and thought I'd use until I spotted that the battle board required many combinations of dice to get 'the good stuff' and as the competition was for a 4 point army I would only get six dice a turn. So a hasty painting of Vikings was called for.
Here are my Vikings (mostly berserkers in the shot) facing Welsh at the start of the game.
My second game against Mike also found me facing Welsh - but with a different troop combination. As there were objectives in each game I decided to make a rush towards two fairly early on. This was a different tactic to my first game where I had opted to go past the objectives, eliminate the enemy and return to collect the spoils of war. As that failed it was time to try some thing new.
My third and final game was against Franks. Two units of mounted Hearthguard and one unit of foot warriors. OK you ask where is the other point of troops? As it happens the mounted Hearthguard were 1.5 units each (6 figures each). This game was against Ralph who was really good at explaining things - especially as I haven't bought the supplement with the rather tricky Frankish battle board. Not that it would have helped if I had.
Here come the mounted Hearthguard..
Did it matter that I lost? No. It was great fun, I made some new friends and enjoyed playing something different.
What did I learn? LOTS! And the most important lesson is that Beserkers may best be left at home.
Finally, the rather nice buildings are produced by Adrian's Walls.