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Has anyone here played Saga the historical skirmish game and is it good?

How does it compare to pre-age of sigmar warhammer fantasy ?

The Allfather wrote:
Has anyone here played Saga the historical skirmish game and is it good?

How does it compare to pre-age of sigmar warhammer fantasy ?

It's enjoyable, but it's a different kind of game to Aos. It's been a while since I've played it so going on memory, I might e misremembering some things.

I wouldn't call it a 'competitive' game though and tend to see it as more 'narrative' focused. It's very dice dependent in a number of ways. And that's a thing too - it also uses custom dice for the game 'board', as well as regular d6s. That said, you can usually figure out an easy 'translation' for the custom dice faces.

I liked the game resolution. It was pretty straight forwards. 2-dice roll resolution to attacks. I liked the game structure. Pretty simple and straight forward. You (generally) have three 'types' of units - elites, regulars and peasants. They come in unit sizes of 4, 8 and 12. As such, very easy to build armies. Along with your hero, who generates 2 dice for the battle board, regular and elite units generate once dice, up to a max of six. At the start of your turn, you roll your dice, and depending on what results you get, you can place those dice on the 'board' and 'spend' them like currency, either to activate a unit, or to put in play a special rule/ability. You also had to worry about 'fatigue' and exhausting your dudes. Earlier, I said that I saw saga as a more narrative game, and the battle board is key to my perception of this. It's very hard to have a master plan for your army, when turn to turn, what you can do is in the hands of the (dice) gods.

Only issue we had with it actually had nothing to do with the game. My,friend got the starter rules anemic that thinking it was a skirmish game on the scale of infinity (so maybe ten to a dozen guys per side) and he was a bit disappointed it could end up being 2 hordes having at each other.

Still, worth a shot. But like I said, I wouldn't make comparisons to Aos.

I love it. Easily my favourite system.

Saga Fantasy is just around the corner and I am seriously looking forward to this.

The units are really quite simple, the complexity comes from using the battleboards and working the combos. Understanding your opponents battleboard is also important which makes learning the game trickier than it would seem.

You have 1 resource that you use to activate units and warband special abilities called Saga dice and a second resource called fatigue which allows you activate general special abilities.

Warbands can be as small as 25 models and as large as 73 when playing 6 points.

on of my top favorite games, highly recommended. also, hairy barbarian models can be pretty much any dark age faction so switching up battle boards is easy

Love this game here, Normans and Anglo-Saxons, looking forwards to a fantasy version (and since the book has pictures of them, at some point Samurai)

its an amazing game and highly frustrating given the inbuilt resource management issue, unlike AoS/Warhammer your army will not alwys do something every turn, indeed its likely you will have some units doing little to allow others to do more.

each unit generates a SAGA dice (warning! generalisation! there are execptions and damaged units lose this), which you roll and the result determines what you can do with it.

e.g. it is frustratingly easy for Normans to have a unit of archers yet not roll the dice required to order them to do anything

It's good fun. Seems well balanced on play so far - half a dozen games. Easy to start, and there seems to be some subtlety built into the combinations.

Try it!

stroller wrote:
It's good fun. Seems well balanced on play so far - half a dozen games. Easy to start, and there seems to be some subtlety built into the combinations.

Try it!

how does archery work and terrain/ line of sight etc? Formations?

The Allfather wrote:

stroller wrote:
It's good fun. Seems well balanced on play so far - half a dozen games. Easy to start, and there seems to be some subtlety built into the combinations.

Try it!

how does archery work and terrain/ line of sight etc? Formations?

There's no formations since it's a skirmish game, but your ranged units can block each other's line of sight.

You get 1 range attack for every 2 Levy or Warriors shooting (which is better than the Levy's 3:1 ratio for melee attacks, but worse than the Warriors 1:1 ratio), and Hearthguard get a single shot per model. It's not super strong, but certain factions can boost their shooting depending on their playstyle. The Welsh in the Age of Vikings books can get very deadly with their hit-and-run, javelin-throwing abilities.