One of the great joys of historical wargaming is the huge potential variety of scenarios, both balanced and extremely not that present themselves. In this respect, the single scenario in the main SAGA rulebook is, shall we say, slightly lacking.
Enter the Book of Battles.
At a slender, soft backed 55 pages (available for £16 from Gripping Beast), the Book of Battles, in fairly characteristic SAGA fashion, gets down to business right away. It presents four new types of scenario, each one with their own twist, ranging from scenarios that are well suited for the competitive milieu that SAGA players often find themselves in to much more narrative scenarios that dispense with balance in exchange for some extra flavor.
Broadly, these are:
- Skirmishes: Technically only a single scenario, but one with enough options to keep one busy for quite some time.
- Battles: New, fairly balanced scenarios, but ones that introduce new types of terrain and special rules to up the complexity of scenarios.
- Legends: Overly narrative scenarios with restrictions on force composition, special rules, etcetera that, like many narrative games, benefit from a bit of pre-planning.
- Mass Battles: Games with three or four players, with a number of mechanics to try to handle the complexities of multiplayer games, and to reward different approaches to how you fight multiple opponents.
It also includes a chapter, aptly named “Sagas”, for those who are looking for a lightweight campaign system.
Alongside this are several new ways to win a game, including those based on minimizing losses, and holding objectives. The latter of these deserves some discussion, as it presents “Conquest Points”, which scale both by the size of the unit (bigger units get more points) and also the quality of the unit (Levies and Mercenaries get half points, Hearthguard get an extra point). This potentially undermines the usual wargamer approach of having cheap objective scoring units, as a small unit of Levies will be fairly underwhelming, especially if they have taken some losses. On the other hand, big Hearthguard units, while potentially massively impactful scoring units, also represent a large portion of your army that’s tied up holding objectives. It’s a neat sort of trade-off system that I’m excited to get a handle on.
Skirmishes
The first type of scenarios (or technically, scenario) is the “Battle of Heroes”. This is a single scenario, but one where you draw cards to dictate the battlefield conditions in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who has seen a Games Workshop Open War-style card deck. The book gives you three options for choosing the conditions: Just roll a bunch of d6’s, one with a combination of rolling off to pick and random selections (influenced by the winning roll), and one with a bit of randomness but which will result in both players picking some of the conditions.
Personally, I love a good purely random scenario generator. They tend to do a good job in forcing people to play differently than their “plan” – for example, in a recent game, my Anglo-Saxons had to move in a way that they normally prefer not to, while my opponents Jomsvikings had to consider that they needed to get units to a place where my units weren’t, rather than just going “Front Toward Enemy” and trying to table me. With six combinations of Scenery, Deployment, Game Length, Special Rule and Victory Conditions, for a total of 7,776 unique combinations, this will provide plenty of variety, though admittedly many of these combinations are variations on a theme. This is probably what my go-to scenario type will be for days at the club for “Hey, do you just want to play SAGA?” pickup games.
One note in playing these – both my opponent and I had trouble keeping track of which rules were in effect. Studio Tomahawk has printable cards available on their website, and these are highly recommended. The fact that there’s not a deck of these available to order, given how printed material heavy SAGA already is, feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.
Battles
The next chapter presents ten new “Battles” scenarios, and introduces rules for Impassable Terrain, Entering and Leaving the table, Objective Markers, Rivers and Baggage, widening the number of things a scenario could be about considerably. The designers then run with this, giving us scenarios for fleeing baggage trains, trying to hold your territory while seizing others, grabbing contested loot and hauling it off, ambushes, and desecrating idols, temples, or other important points. My personal favorite is “A Tale of Challenges”, a direct homage to Daniel Mersey’s systems, which often include a system for making boasts that will reward you for achieving them – or penalize you for failing. Given my fondness for both Lion Rampant and Pikeman’s Lament, this one spoke to me.
In essence, one starts with a balanced deployment map, and then you alternate choosing challenges, somewhere between one and four. These can range from “Invincibility”, where you choose one enemy turn from the third onwards and declare you won’t lose a single figure, to “I protect my land”, where no enemy units of four or more figures can be within L+M of your table edge at the end of the game. Each has a reward for achieving it – ranging from 4 to 8, and a penalty for failure, ranging from three to eight. The dynamic of getting to pick both your objectives and the ceiling of your potential points – but also possibly forcing yourself into “Go big or go home” gameplay – is an extremely fun looking one.
The new river terrain randomly makes rivers anything from mildly inconvenient to impassable and enables the classic “clash over a bridge” type battle – which also finds its way into one of the scenarios.
Overall, the new “Battles” scenarios add slightly more complexity, but remain largely in the realm of balanced, symmetrical scenarios. This, to be clear, is not a bad thing, and with a full ten scenarios and a lotof variety here, this section is well worth spending some time exploring.
Legends
The chapter where, at least ostensibly, the writers throw off the cloak of balance in pursuit of a more compelling story. As with “Battles”, these scenarios come with more rules to layer on – in this case, rules for entering buildings, including occupying them, firing in and out, and assaulting them – as well as obstacles, livestock, the ability for troops to dismount, civilians, and fighting at night. Thankfully, these are rarely all used at the same time.
The four scenarios here touch on familiar narratives but are each very unique. There’s a proper cattle raid, which pleases my nascent Irish force to no end, a raid to pillage a hamlet where the defending player initially only has civilians but will rapidly receive reinforcements, while the attacker attempts to secure livestock and pillage the village’s buildings for valuables. Those valuables have weight, which means you cannot pile up everything on to one unit to hoof it all off the board. There’s a terrain-dense urban uprising mission, with randomly generated event tokens that both generate victory points and new game conditions, ranging from civilians begging for your protection to capturing the mayor of the town disguised as an old woman. Rounding out the scenarios is an encounter between forces in an unexplored land, where event tokens are once more used to generate uncertainty, ranging from mundane unstable terrain to considerably more mystic seeming cryptic obelisks. The goal is to push into this new land – and survive both your opponent and its dangers.
While these missions are less balanced, they look like a ton of fun. I give points to the urban uprising mission for pushing for more terrain than is usual for SAGA, and the cattle raid and village plundering scenarios are classic setups for a reason. In addition to being standalone scenarios, I think these act as points of inspiration for homebrewed scenarios, convention games and campaigns.
Mass Battles
Multiplayer scenarios are sort of a white whale of game design, in my experience. Everyone wants to be able to play against all their buddies, but these games often degenerate into “Everyone pick on one person until we’re out of people” sessions that are less than fun.
The SAGA team makes their attempt at these with the “Mass Battles” scenarios, which are played on a larger 6’x4’ board. They also helpfully define the reach of SAGA abilities – abilities that target “all units” do exactly that, while those that target enemy units impact one or all of your enemies depending on how they are worded, while those that benefit all friendly units only impact you, and not your allies. There are similarly rules for who can use fatigue, and when. While somewhat complex, these sorts of rules invariably come up in multiplayer games, so it’s great to see them introduced up front.
There are three scenarios presented here, touching on the three major forms of multiplayer games: Ones with the players allied to each other, free for all scrums, and ones involving the phrase “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.”
“Brothers in Arms” is the allied scenario, and presents a straightforward scenario, which each alliance taking turns…in turn…with the option to add some slight twists to the scenario. “Battle Royale” is the free-for-all (I’d argue the hardest type of game to pull off), that attempts to keep things even by introducing a system where the player whose turn it is gets to decide who gets to go next (perhaps warding off an opponent targeting them by picking someone aiming for their opponent’s flank), with a token system to ensure the roughly even distribution of player turns. I haven’t had the chance to try this one out yet, but I am curious to see how well it works.
My personal favorite, as someone whose 40K Eldar army has been called to switch sides in many a narrative game to try to keep things balanced, is “Wooden Oaths”. A four-player game with a “Black Team” and a “Red Team”, and at the end of a turn, each player has the opportunity to switch sides, until they are locked in at the end of the fourth turn. Massacre points are then added up, but divided by the size of the team, so someone who saw their erstwhile allies betray them may end up winning based on a doomed but heroic three-on-one last stand.
Sagas
As a fan of campaign play (I’ve been running my local club’s 40K crusade campaign for about three years now), this section had me excited. Somewhat similar to how Crusade handles named characters, armies using Legendary Units as their warlord need not apply. The stories of Alfred the Great, or Saladin, have already been written. This system also follows the story of your warlord, not the entire army, so focuses on them.
Your warlord earns experience during battles – for everything from taking part (2 XP) to winning the game (1XP). Somewhat nicely, only one of the possible options (winning the game) require success. Most simply involve doing something, which will help weaker warlords, or worse players, not fall impossibly far behind by losing a string of battles. Your warlord is also effectively immortal – the central conceit of this system is that your saga is being written, and that is conditional on being worthy of having a saga, so there’s no one-battle fatalities. The only way for a Warlord to exit is to receive 100 XP – they are now a figure of song and legend, and their saga is complete, not unlike how the leaders in Daniel Mersey’s Pikeman’s Lament can be promoted to lead a full regiment, and thus are promoted outside the scope of the game.
Experience itself is spent on “Talents”, each of which is inside a “Domain”. Each talent has a level, between 1 and 3, and the cost goes up as you go to higher levels, and as you have more domains. These domains can make your Warlord better at ranged combat, more durable in terms of both armor or resilience, faster, better in melee, or even richer. The bonuses are nice, and can play to your Warlord’s strength, but none strike me as overly game breaking. Addressing the perennial problem with campaigns like this, where someone being able to play more than other players means they’re likely to be considerably more powerful, there’s a series of handicaps that provide cumulative bonuses to the underdog, ranging from small bonus to extra SAGA dice, etc.
There’s also a sort of non-campaign version of this system provided to let you customize your Warlords a little, spending as many points on Talents as the size of the SAGA armies you’re playing with (i.e. 6 points for Talents for a 6-point warband), which will let players do a bit of customization to push their Warlord’s abilities one way or the other. This feels like a fun addition for some narrative play, but I don’t think it’s an added bit of complexity I’d look for when seeking out pickup games.
Overall Thoughts
In my opinion, the Book of Battles is essentially a must-have for the passionate SAGA player. As solid and flexible as “Clash of Warlords” is, there’s so much potential, both for gameplay and narrative purposes, in having access to a broader range of scenarios. The authors do an excellent job here of presenting a broad swathe of setups, ranging from extremely narrative to new, but nicely balanced, competitive scenarios. They’ve also provided enough new rules and inspiration to act as some guides to writing your own scenarios. While the Sagas system is lightweight, as far as campaign system goes, it’s a good one for getting people into the idea of campaign play, and it involves a minimal amount of bookkeeping and homework, which often turns people off from campaign systems. It’s also one that can work for an event, giving players a couple boosts, but no more than that, over the course of a few games in a weekend. While there are more complexities one could tie to such a system, one of my frequent pieces of advice to people running their first campaign is not to pile on the complexity from the outset, and the Sagas system definitely serves that purpose.
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