Building a force for a skirmish game out of a single kit is often a gratifying experience. There’s something to be said for “Buy this box and be done.” This is, generally, also how I get people into Silver Bayonet. Hand them a single box of Perry Napoleonics, and they’ve got everything they’ll need for a long, long time.
SAGA warbands are a bit more challenging, but the good folks at Victrix have produced a powerful contender in their 60 figure Late Saxons/Anglo Danes kit, which is currently available for $47 straight from Victrix. The kit itself is reviewed here, but briefly you get eight plastic sprues – six that are a mix of armored and unarmored infantry, and two command sprues containing nobles, standard bearers, priests and the like. I also ordered some of the appropriate shield transfers, because having seen them in use, they look really slick.
It’s SAGA Summer! Enjoy our coverage during the raiding season as we take a look at the factions, miniatures, and everything else you need to get started playing SAGA and earning massacre points.
The challenge? Build a functional Anglo-Saxon army from these components for my gaming club’s loaner Anglo-Saxon army.
As an aside, to anyone running a club interested in getting people into historicals? I’ve found loaner armies to be very effective.
Warband Design Considerations
The Goonhammer review of the Anglo-Saxon faction has a compelling, fyrd heavy list, but we’re going to build for something a little different for a couple reasons. First, and most obvious, is said Goonhammer list has a point worth of bow-armed levies, and that violates our one kit rule.
Beyond that, I want to make sure we include at least one unit of Hearthguard, a unit of Warriors, and a unit of Levies, so that new players can get the feel for each type of units, and their strengths and weaknesses. It’s been my experience, for example, that new players assume Hearthguard will last far longer in combat than they often do, and I want them to have that play experience before they start building lists around them.
As a bonus objective, I’d like to stretch the kit as far as it will go, because I’m paying my own money for something to donate to the club.
With those goals and/or restrictions in mind, let’s get started…
The Warlord
Being as he’s the core of the warband, we start with the warlord. Turning to the command sprue, there’s a number of good options for armored, sword-armed nobles. I ended up picking the fanciest looking lad in the largest cape, gave him a helmet with a relatively ornate nasal bar, and put him on a big base.
This isn’t nearly as nice as some of the spectacular basing vignettes you can pull off if you’re drawing from multiple kits, but it’ll serve the purpose. One of the goals of our club’s loaner armies is to be somewhat generic (our 30 Years War force is led by “The Spaniard”), so a somewhat generic but serviceable warlord will do nicely here.
The Priest
There are several priest options on the two command sprues, and I wanted to include one, as they’re an option for a heroic character in the “Swords for Hire” section of Age of Vikings. The purpose of this is two-fold: It lets people play and learn with non-Warlord hero units, and one that plays well with and is in character for the Anglo-Saxon army. And it also gets us a full point in our army for a model that doesn’t really have another role in the rules it could fill.
There are parts for a raised, admonishing hand and a large, cross-topped staff that feels perfect for a priest or bishop who has marched with the local lord to see the heathens thrown back into the sea.
The Priest, Part 2
Remember how I said that the priest models don’t really have another role in the rules? This remains true, but I wanted to squeeze a little more out of the command sprue, and there’s a second priest. I built him a little differently, giving him a hood, a club, and that same hand, which in this case I choose to read more as slightly more “Follow me!”.
What’s his purpose? Rather than taking him as another priest, my plan is to work him into one of the levy units, as a sort of Father Pyrlig (the Last Kingdom version of him)-esq figure, fighting alongside the men of Wessex/Mercia/Wherever It Is We Are. Just a bit of character, and an excuse to stretch those sprues a little more and given the lack of weapon-specific stats in SAGA for the most part, one that I don’t anticipate being problematic in play.
The Rest of the Army
Having now assembled a points worth of heroes and the warlord, it’s time to turn to the rest of the list itself. Given the goals of the army detailed above, most of the list writes itself – we need one each of Hearthguard, Warriors, and Levies. That will leave us with a total of four of our six points. We’ll round that out with another unit of Levies, recognizing that a mass of farmers with spears forming the fyrd is really where the Anglo-Saxon faction shines. The last point will be spent on a second unit of Hearthguard, boosting their size to eight to make them work a little better with the Anglo-Saxon SAGA abilities, and conveniently exhausting the command sprue.
The Hearthguard are the most straightforward – again, we turn to the command sprues, which come with four armored bodies and an abundance of weapon options. In this case, we’re arming them all with swords, which is both what they should be armed with, and also conveniently marks them out as Hearthguard – if a figure is armored and a sword, they’re Hearthguard. Armored with a spear? Warrior. Unarmored with a spear? Levy.
I also included a banner bearer for the Hearthguard, who is the one exception to this rule, as the kit only really comes with an unarmored standard bearer. Given he’s not going to be fighting, I again don’t think this is a terrible breach in terms of WYSIWYG and it shouldn’t have any impact on playability. The banner bearer is also my single violation of the one kit rule – I swapped out his banner pole for a metal one, as this is an army meant to be lent, and see heavy use, and I don’t feel like repairing his banner as often as I anticipate would be required with the plastic one.
That leaves us with the Warriors and Levy to do.
Each of the six standard sprues has four clearly armored bodies, three clearly unarmored bodies, and a sort of ambiguous figure wearing a lot of leather. I decided that the leather armored body was just a somewhat wealthier member of the fyrd and started building. This is also where my brain decided to stop following Victrix’s frankly lackluster assembly instructions, and just started free building, mindful only of the need to not attach an arm with an elbow to a body already possessing an elbow. For the most part this, and a bit of frantic rotating while plastic glue set, resulted in very few awkward poses. Some repetitiveness is inevitable, but this seemed a decent enough way to minimize it. More randomization was added in the form of snapping several spears during assembly. There is one armored body who is in a pose with a little bit too much lunge to fit on the standard 25mm bases I was using, so he gets a slightly bigger one, and I avoid that body for the rest of the warband.
And that’s the army.
Playtesting
It would be something of a disservice to have a log of how to build a one-kit warband, only for that warband to be…well…bad. And I make no claims that if you make your way to a competitive event that you’ll do well with it. But I’ve now played a couple games both with and against it, mostly against Vikings and Jomsvikings, and it’s done well. It largely works like it’s supposed to – the Warriors and Levy usually take a charge, hold, and prove remarkably dangerous, while the Priest mostly tries to keep fatigue off them, and the warlord waits for Bretwalda to be triggered and goes ham. I’ve had the most success with the Hearthguard either as the sort of intended accompaniment to the Warlord, or as a counter-attack unit to tilt a fight my way.
So far it’s with rate is about 50/50, and it’s resulted in fun games, so I’ll take that.
What Remains
There’s a lot of kit left over when all this is done – 24 Levy, 8 Warriors, 8 Hearthguard, a Priest and a Warlord comes out to 42 figures. There’s plenty left over here for expansion, and in my mind, some very logical ways to do that expanding.
What I’ve got left on the regular sprues after that is another sixteen armored bodies (fewer if you don’t use any of Sir Lungealot’s bodies), and a scant two unarmored ones. Plus a variety of weapons that may or may not result in coherent poses. That means we’ve tapped out the kit’s ability to manage more Levy, but we could still potentially add Yet More Hearthguard ™ by using the many excess swords in the kit or two bulky units of warriors, the latter of which probably has more potential.
Or one could use it as the seed of a whole second warband…some Anglo-Danes or Vikings perhaps?
The Best Place to Start SAGA?
There are some starter kits that are just “Buy this, be done.” In my mind, the king of this particular hill is the Games Workshop Adeptus Titanicus starter, which is just mind-blowingly good. The Victrix Late Saxons/Anglo Danes kit is there. There’s not just a whole warband in that bag, there’s a whole warband with options in that bag. If there was one failing to the kit, it’s a paucity of one-handed axes if one wanted to build an Anglo-Dane force, which Victrix explains is essentially offset by the surplus of axes in the Vikings kit. I’d love to see some here, but I get it.
The best place to start SAGA is, of course, with an army you’re interested in. But if one of those interests is the Anglo-Saxons? I think this is a very strong contender for the foundation of any new warband.
Going to pick up a one-bag warband? Why not do so and support goonhammer at the same time through our Victrix affiliate link?
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
