Four Colour Super Minis: First SAGA Game

Leon and I got together last week for a bit of a go at SAGA, the rules all the cool kids have been playing last year. Being something of a fashion victim/trend-setter and while I have had the rules for ages but this was actually the first time we have played the game as it has taken me about two years to get my warbands ready.

We found SAGA to be lots of fun- it is a radically different game to any others we have played, and it is fast pace and fun. We played with four point warbands, and found that we could easily get through a game in an hour, and that is with a rules set we are still leaning!

Combat was suitably brutal and short affair, and usually decisive one way or another. In the first game Leon's Viking berserkers cut a bloody swathe through my ranks.

It strikes me that SAGA is one of those games that is easy to learn but difficult to master. There are lots of tactical decisions to be made, and that keeps it lively and fresh.

By the end of the day what had we learned? SAGA is a lot of fun, for sure, and I can see why it has become an instant hit in the gaming community It is brutal, quick and bloody, which is the way I like my Viking action. Berserkers are REALLY scary and need to be managed (i.e. quickly killed) if you are fighting against them. We also need more units and more options. Four points is the minim sized war band recommended in the game, but I think another unit or two for either side would be great. I also plan to do some Normans, while Leon is going to do a Jomsviking warband. This will give us four different warbands, which will greatly increase the variation. In the mean time, we can carry on trying to master the subtle variations of the Viking and Anglo-Danish warbands, and once we have dome that we can swap armies and do it all again. I think there is a lot of life left in this game and we will defiantly come back to it!