Hi,
So when I was in Rochester about a month ago and I picked up a copy of Strandhogg -- a set of Viking Age Skirmish Rules. Tonight I gave the rules a little bit of a playtest.
An overview of the rules
So, like the rules say, it's a Viking Age Skirmish game. Small groups of men (under 50 per side) go at it tooth and claw wherever the longships land. The game has a focus on Viking vs. Saxons or Normans on the English shore, but the rules can easily accommodate other Viking foes (which includes just about everyone in Europe and a few Native Americans). The rules handle this by recognizing that a guy with a sword is a guy with a sword no matter who he swears allegiance to and that it's largely a matter of training and experience that determines a warrior's effectiveness. The rules also recognize that in the rough-and-tumble warfare of the period, a good leader can really swing the tide.
Players create an "army" consisting of a noble and up to three warbands who follow him. There's a point system and like all such systems it's a little bit suspect, but in my playtest the values seemed pretty good. There's a worksheet that includes important rules and lets you quickly work out what your forces are. Your warbands are made up of warriors of several types -- Warriors, Levy, Archers, or Peasants -- you can mix and match if you like, but it will increase the bookkeeping a bit.
Once you've got you armies, you set out the terrain, discuss any special rules and draw a fate card for each warband in your army. Fate cards are a set of lucky events you can call on to help you out in different situations. You also set up activation cards. Using a standard playing deck, each warband gets a card and you shuffle this mini-deck together to determine the order of warband activation. I really like these randomized activation systems. It adds a bit of uncertainty and forces a bit of careful planning that's lacking from UGO-IGO activation systems.
When one of your warbands is up to go, it tests for morale (usually caused by casualties). Failed morale checks cause your warriors to flee and makes you that much more vulnerable. As your warband gets smaller, the leader has a harder time keeping things together.
After morale, comes missile fire. Missile fire is handled really well in this game. Each figure takes an individual shot against an individual target that it can see. There are clear acetone templates that you center over the target. Roll low and your target is hit. Roll too high and the shot misses, but there are other numbered zones on the template. If another figure falls under the zone you rolled, it gets hit instead. So you can shoot into melee, but there's a chance you'll hit your friends. It also means that unless your warband is in a Shieldwall formation, it doesn't want to clump up too much. Targets who are hit make a saving throw and if they fail they're probably dead.
The next phase is movement. As long as your warband stays in the command radius of your leader, this is pretty simple. Move your commander up to 6" and then arrange the warband around the commander within the command radius. Things get a bit tricker when a group goes out of command, but you'll try hard to avoid that since they'll be weaker in combat. There are simple rules for dealing with obstacles and rough terrain and it moves along pretty swiftly. If you want to close with an enemy target, you have to test against the moving figure's courage.
Finally, it's melee time. It's an opposed die roll so both sides get to participate. After working out the various modifiers (mostly based on a figure's troop type), the high roll wins and the margin of success determines the result. I'm a big fan of opposed die rolls that resolve a round of combat in one go so this is a big plus for the game in my book.
Once all the warbands have gone, you shuffle the activation deck and go again until one side or the other achieves it's objectives. Pretty simple really.
One fine day on the English coastline
So I decided to set up some figures and have a little fight. I don't actually have a selection of Viking miniatures so I raided my AT-43 collection for some proxy figures. The Vikings were played by the Therians and the Saxon defenders were Red Blok troopers. I didn't do anything too fancy. The Vikings consisted of two warbands made up Warriors bearing sword and shield. The Saxons had two large groups of Levy troops and a smaller warband of Archers. I set up a couple of cargo containers and walls to rough out a couple of beach-side huts and turned them loose.
At first, the Vikings had things all their own way. Good activation card draws let them rush up to the wall before the Archers could draw a good bead on them and started tearing through the Saxon levies. With a +2 modifier to their rolls, the Vikings were hacking them down mercilessly. But once they cleared the wall, they were within close range of the archers who started peppering them with fire and picking them off one by one. On the Viking right, the advance was stalled as the Vikings' courage failed them and they refused to advance into close combat. This let the Saxons gang up on the one or two who made it into contact with them and they managed to hold them up or kill them outright.
Between the archery and the swarms of levies, the Viking Left lost heart and soon it was just the Viking Jarl facing off against some angry levies. The Viking right did better and wiped out their opposing warband, but they were exposed to the archers who were slowly whittling them down. Then the Viking Jarl fell to one of the Saxon commanders and I called the game at that point.
Final thoughts
So what did I think? The game played pretty fast. I didn't use mounted troops so I didn't get a chance to cover that and I mostly ignored my Fate cards so that didn't have much impact, but in a game where you're paying attention, it could be a lifesaver.
The Vikings lost pretty badly, but I put that down to poor tactics on my part and not getting stuck in with the Archers sooner (or at all really). The Archers would break pretty easily if the Vikings had concentrated on it and once they were out of the fight, they could probably handle the levies pretty handily. Certainly there was a pretty big pile of levy casualties when the game was called.
Commanders and Nobles (leader types) are really tough to take out. They've got monstrous combat scores and they've got a small track of hit points. In addition, you can't have more than 2 figures gang up on any one figure. So the best way to take down a leader (if you can't snipe him out with an arrow) is to go up with one of your leaders and grunt. Have the grunt take the first swing and you'll have a small bonus on the follow-up attack with your leader. Still, it's a lot of ties and no-effect hits and even when you do succeed, you haven't taken him out of the fight.
Missile fire seems pretty deadly since if you don't make the save you're dead and the best save is 50% in the open, but it just means that you really have to close fast since there's a minimum range for missile weapons and an Archer's hand-to-hand score is terrible.
The game is certainly a good candidate for convention games since the rules are pretty simple and easy to pick up. You could also multiple nobles on a side, each leading their own warband. This allows you to have slightly more complex games than simple line battles by giving each noble separate (and possibly conflicting) goals to achieve.
All in all, a pretty interesting little game.
later
Tom
No comments:
Post a Comment