Oathmark

Because it is miniatures neutral, and has an early Dark Ages vibe, I decided to give the Oathmark fantasy battle rules a try.  This way, I can get my late Roman era Goths, Franks, and Saxons, as well as Romano-British stuff, on the table a little more often, and meet other players who may not be historically-oriented.  So I set a game up with Nellie (who I met through Saga club, so there you go), against their LOTR Elves.

My Gothic infantry in their starting position.

Oathmark uses d10s and a I-activate-a-unit-you-activate-a-unit system, which seems to be emerging as the new trending thing in games design. You make an activation roll for that unit, but you roll two dice and only need one to beat the target number. You frequently get a third die because a commander is nearby. If the activation is successful you get two actions for that unit (so move-and-turn, or shoot-and-move, or cast-a-spell-and-move). If you fail the activation, you still get one action, usually with limitations. 

Gothic infantry advances across the open ground.

As you can guess, fail-an-activation-but-still-get-to-do-something-just-not-as-good keeps the game moving at decent clip. In our game, I tried sending my cavalry on a flank march around wooded areas, while my infantry came up the center to keep the Elves occupied. Elves are good archers and quickly started picking off 3 figures here and 3 figures there. Gothic archers didn't shoot as well and I kept putting my wizard in the wrong place so he could not be as effective as he could be (you need line of sight to cast spells - most of which give boosts or minuses to units).

Gothic infantry, led by a champion, closes in on Elvish infantry.

After picking off a lot of Gothic infantry with archery, the Goths were able to pull off a flank attack that seemed very underwhelming at first, until it triggered a chain reaction of pushbacks amongst three separate Elvish units, which gave the flank attack a nice chaotic result.

Goth infantry making flank attack.

Then, finally, the Gothic cavalry landed its punch on some Elvish archers, and showed why they cost twice as much as infantry, almost completely destroying an Elvish archer unit in one combat.

Gothic cavalry.

Unfortunately for me, by this time the Goth infantry was fairing quite poorly, so it was too little, too late for the Gothic cavalry.

Disordered Gothic infantry.

The champion-led Goth infantry broke, the infantry with a captain was quickly reduced. The cavalry became disordered and was then decimated by archery.

"Run away! Run away!"

So, a convincing Elvish win, and I can not blame the dice, which is always a plus. I probably could have been more crafty, letting my cavalry get into better position on the flank before advancing the infantry, and tried to time both closing into melee at about the same time, whereas instead I basically split my forces and allowed Nellie to beat each in turn. I also ran my infantry units on the big side: 18-19 figures each, which is fine for infantry but archers can probably be in smaller 10 (or even less) figure units, as the most dice a unit can ever generate for shooting or melee is 5 (which is the troops in the front rank).  Nellie's elves were in smaller archer units, which gave them more shooting attacks/options in a round, versus my single shot by an oversized unit.

Will play again, and look forward to hopefully a quicker game as the learning curve diminishes.

Saga Club (Return to)

I have not played Saga in almost four years, but given good reports about the second edition, and being aware of an active play group, I decided I would rather play frequent, short, small miniature games, than not play at all.  Plus, good way to meet new players, try different venues, etc.

Black Tree Design Saxons, prepped and glued to squares of cereal box cardboard for painting.

I've owned the above Black Tree Design figures for over four years and never got around to painting them.  I had not sold them because I always though they were nice sculpts and you never know.  In the intervening four years I did, however, sell quite a few painted Saga warband figures (all my Welsh), and others I used for Saga were rebased on multibases for use in Late Roman/Arthurian games (early Saxons and Irish).  This cleared the runway for the Black Tree figures to finally be painted. I remembered to take progress photos this time...

Figure primed with thin coat of gesso. I really like this pose.

Figures block painted but prior to a wash with a matte medium/water/black paint mixture.

Some figures after applying the wash.

More figures after applying the wash.

Still more figures after applying the wash. The draco figure originally had a cast banner pole. I trimmed that off, drilled out his hand, added a steel wire pole, and topped it with a plastic draco from an old Wargames Factory sprue.

Completed figures out on parade on my gaming table.

Figures in the rear are the Eureka Miniatures' "Beowulf Retinue" set. I painted those years ago but touched them up (as well as 8 Crusader Miniatures' Saxon axemen) to get this warband to over 50 figures.

With the new Saxon warband painted up, I set a game with Pete and we met on Friday after work. I used the Viking battleboard and ran six points of all warriors in five units. Pete ran Pagan Rus, with three warrior groups and a eight-figure hearthguard. 

Pete spent the first two or three turns backpedaling or keeping his distance while I crawled across the board.

Finally there was some action in the center which his Rus got the better of.

To be honest, up to turn 4 out of 5 I was starting to feel that the game was a bit rubbish and maybe I had made a mistake in trying to get back in. We'd been playing for almost an hour and the majority of figures had not been in combat yet. But then on the last turn I rolled two rare symbols and got to play the Ragnarok ability, which gave all my units a free charge activation, so there was melees all around. I was already losing at this point (somewhat badly, at that), but some decent attacks made it respectable.

I need to remember to take more of these low-angle shots as they look much better. The "table overview" shots in these skirmish games look rather bland...

We'll see where this all leads but I have low expectations. It was simply nice to meet someone for a quick in-person game after work.