Saga AAR: Sacred Ground

Played a quick game of Saga at the club yesterday to refresh my memory of the rules and also to try the Norse Gaels out for the first time. We have a Saga tournament/game day coming up on Sunday, and as I don't have a beard I need to try find some other edge in the game.

My forces were:
Warlord - Dane Axe
8 Hearthguard - Dane Axes
2x6 Warriors - Dane Axes
4 Warriors - Dane Axes
8 Gall Gaedhill.

My opponent played Vikings with roughly the following composition
Warlord
4 Berserkers
12 Hearthguard
4x4 Warriors.

We decided to play Sacred Ground as it's one of the scenarios in use on Sunday and it's nice and simple. As I had fever units I was finished with deployment first and got to start the game.

The situation after deployment. Vikings deployed in a line while the Norse Gaels are more spread out to grab the objectives (hill, rocks and large forest). Gall Gaedhill are taking advantage of their free move after deployment.

 The smallest group of Warriors seize the forest for Norse Gaels while Gall Gaedhill take the hill. Vikings counter-attack with the 12 man hearthguard unit, which loses 6 men against the Gall Gaedhill, while they lose 5 winning the clash.

Norse Gael Hearthguard move in to finish the warriors finishing them off. In turn they are counter-attacked by Viking Berserkers with both groups perishing in the ensuing melee.

The small group of warriors still bravely hanging back in the forest.

 Viking Warriors kill the last of Gall Gaedhill and things start to look a bit sketchy for the Norse-Gaels

The two 6-man Warrior groups move in to help their Warlord with the closest one attacking two of the 4-man Viking groups, wiping one out and killing 3 out of 4 of the other. In turn they lose 4 men and are left in a difficult position.

 With their Warlord left alone the Warrior group rushes in, but they are too late as the Warlord succumbs to attacks. He does manage to take out all the remaining Viking Warriors in one final attempt at glory.

The Warriors arrive just in time to see their Warlord fall and quickly avenge him by killing the lone Viking Warlord.

Meanwhile the brave warriors in the woods have moved up to the edge to cheer at their comrades.

The game ended quite fast with all the Vikings and all but 8 Norse Gael Warriors wiped out at the beginning of turn 5. Points wise the game ended 35 - 14 for the Norse Gaels so a clear win. Wielding the hearthguard in a unit of 8 did give me an extremely strong unit, but did leave me sorely needing more Saga dice immediately when they went down. Might give them a try as two 4 man units or then ditch the Gall Gaedhill and get more warriors or hearthguard instead. That way I would have a bit more of a buffer of units before losing them starts to hurt.

Painting Challenge entry 15: Nurgle Daemon Prince

Time for the next fortnight challenge entry, this time with the theme "Favorite Character". I went with a Nurgle Daemon Prince to celebrate the loving touch of Papa Nurgle. Chaos has always been my favorite faction in Warhammer and now that I sort of restarted it by digging up old minis it had to be the way to go. Of the four Chaos gods Nurgle has somehow always been my favorite. The disease ridden greenish hordes just somehow caught my eye.

To lead my new forces I of course needed a mighty hero and what would be better than a daemon prince. Sadly I'm not too thrilled about the Jabba the Hutt style aesthetics of Nurgle Greater Daemons etc. and then the regular Daemon Princes just look a bit too clean to be aligned to Nurgle. So I really had no choice but to convert something a bit more suitable for myself. I like the looks of GW's Plague Drones and thought that a bloated corpse fly would be the best shape for a mighty champion of Nurgle to morph into when he is bestowed with more and more of Nurgles gifts. The mini itself is made up of parts from GW's Daemon Prince, Plague Drone and Chaos Spawn box. And a helluva lot of green stuff...

Nearly everything on the mini except for details has been painted with an airbrush. The armor on his back was painted green with brown for shadows and yellow for highlights. The skin was painted with violet in the recesses and in the areas of any cuts and boils to simulate bruising and then covered with a light layer of yellowish brown and a final highlight of light grey. This was all washed down with brown and red inks to give the shadows a bit of definition and to have the lowest part of the body look suitably gory. I finally added a bit of violet on the tips of the wings to add some contrast.

All the oozing pus and paint was done with GW's special effect paints. Mostly worked out great, but I put a bit too much on his stomach area and wasn't able to clean it up afterwards. Didn't have time to repaint the area with the skin tone so I just had to add more pus to get him done in time for the challenge.

Painting Challenge entry 14: Winter War Ski troops

Next step in my Winter War project was finishing a small 5 man squad of Finns with skis. I had wanted to do them for the hero themed fortnight challenge, but thanks to the delivery taking over a month to arrive from the UK I had to skip them then.

The minis are from Warlord and are just far superior to anything from Baker Company. Not without their own problems though, as at least my set was filled with horrendous amounts of flash that took ages to clean. Still most of the detail is crisp and the flash was in areas that was relatively easy to clean without damaging any details so I'm pretty happy with them. Another issue I had was that all but one rifle was missing the end of the barrel and the front sights. Won't matter during gaming, but does stand out a bit in close-ups.

I'm probably going to run them as a Kaukopartio or Sissi squad in Bolt Action as they differ quite a bit from anything that Baker Company does so they won't really mix that well into other squads. Will be interesting to see how the Baker Company ski troopers will end up looking. The greens looked a bit hollywoodish, but it's quite hard to say from just pictures.

 

I'm a bit behind schedule on the challenge at the moment, I'm hoping to catch up with my last few entries as I have the last Winter War Finns about 50% complete now and I'm planning on doing a rather large entry for the final fortnight challenge. Plus I have the challenge "entry fee" nearly done and Danny the Dino is only missing eyes and teeth anymore. There are however some hindrances with a gaming weekend and a quick holiday trip in between me and my painting.