Battle for Wadi Nashif : Saga Crescent and Cross

Not a historical battle but I thought it would be fun to roll out a Crescent and Cross Saga game for a change and mainly so I could get the Saracen archers completed a few weeks ago on the table. I mustered up two 7 point warbands using the Crusader and Saracen boards. We had a simple random deployment which ended up with a corner to corner battle, the saracens slightly obstructed by the wadi itself. We played 6 turns with the victory going to the side who had killed the most of the enemy.

The Saracen force coming on from the corner where the wadi is located, light cavalry and archers

Some light spearmen and heavy camel riders supporting the warlord

The crusaders of course have knights, crossbowmen and armoured spearmen

The Arab light horse seeks to gain advantage on the left flank

The saracens use some of their tricky board activations to draw the Crusader knights across the board splitting up their advance and then crashing in their charge

The light archers hiding in the wadi move forward to try and target the enemy horse

The camels getting the charge wipe out one unit of knights and the Crusader warlord is lucky to escape with his life

The Saracen archers keeping in the cover of the wadi

But within a couple of turns both the camels and the crusader knights have been destroyed and the Crusader Warlord has been caught out in the open on his own and put to death

The saracen light horse now moves up

The battle is in a delicate position with almost equal VP’s the Saracen warlord is incredibly lucky to survive one assault 

The battle could go either way

The Crusader foot knights charge in one last time to attack the Saracen warlord, but he survives again through some lucky dice rolls

He can then charge forward with the remaining light cavalry to finish the battle and claim victory

A tightly fought battle with the saracens getting lucky rolls just when they needed them. I wouldn’t want to play SAGA every week but it is always fun every now and then. It was a balanced battle going down to the last 2 combats.

We also visited  Vapnartak wargame show at the weekend, slightly smaller than previous years, but nice to catch up with a few people and talk about wargaming all day with like minded folk. Sadly no bring and buy due to the COVID restrictions but I wasn’t going to go home empty handed.

A mix of Foundry Figures for the ‘Great Game’ a couple of gripping beast warlords and rockets and craters for another sideline project 🤢

All the best and thinks for looking 👍

A return to Saga : Dark Age Battle

We haven’t played Saga for what seems ages and ages. So it felt like a time to give it a go, start of the new year and all that. Anyway we enjoyed it so will definitely be having another game soon perhaps with my extended Crescent and Cross figures ?. Anyway onto the action, a small Viking raiding force has found its way somewhere on the east coast of Northumberland, having sailed their longboat upriver they have jumped ship in search of the usual loot, women plunder etc.......not too many photos today

The village is close to the river, Norsemen attacking from the left, the Saxons need bigger units to make the most of their battleboard and need to play slightly defensively, the Vikings are initially reluctant to rush in

A small unit of fearsome berserkers running through the wooded area 

The Saxon lord’s bodyguard are mounted making them very mobile but with only 4 in a unit although they are strong in combat they are culnerable to shooting so try to keep under cover

Come and have a go !

On the left of the village a unit of levy, despite being fairly soft use long ranged attacks and some clever shield play to defeat the first charge, with a large unit of warriors on the left as well this gives the Saxons the advantage

The Viking archers eventually get too close and are charged by the heavy Saxon cavalry, they are pushed back

The berserkers have been seen off, and the Vikings on the far side of the river are reluctant to charge into combat piecemeal, the Saxon levy take the opportunity to whittle the numbers down

....and suddenly the second unit of Saxon warriors appears from the left trapping the marauders, the Viking Bondi charge in death or glory style but the battle is really up, the Saxons can pick the remainder off unit by unit.

A fun game, unusually we always remember the Saxons being rubbish but they did really well today, may just have been luck, need to keep the units large to keep the bonuses. We’ll be back with Saga soon I hope. 

Viking Dawn.........

With preparation time slightly limited by real world complications, for our next game we played another skirmish game, with a quick change of scenery and the removal of crocodiles we had a SAGA skirmish somewhere in northern France where a small Viking band is seeking to best the local Norman Lord.

It has been ages since we played SAGA and it showed with my knowledge of the Basic rules and the strengths of the Norman battle board woefully lacking. But we took some nice photos.

The set up required both sides to come on from opposite corners bringing  the river into play and slowing down the Norman advance

The Vikings booooooo

Somehow the Viking archers deploy quickly and start to shoot across the river

The Norman’s seem reluctant to engage in battle but that might just be the commanders incompetence!

Norman cross bowmen should be powerful but are exhausted quickly by arrow fire

That’s more like it Norman Knights galloping into combat, but I should have had them in groups of six as they manage to lose the combat and get themselves wiped out !

Even the Viking archers sensing victory start to wade the river (oh for a crocodile now !)

Bad to worse, by the village more valiant Norman knights are cut down

The final Norman’s decide to charge in.......

Scoring some minor confusion as a Norseman is caught in the bushes with his trousers down.

A couple of these Norman units were recently painted so I shouldn’t have expected much more, a resounding victory to the Vikings mainly to my poor handling. We need to give them another run out to regain their honour 🤔

This weeks painting : 28 mm Arabs

The news in the UK is somewhat depressing currently, I wonder if amongst the many conflicts which have occurred across Europe we can find a similar situation to the current political crisis ?

Anyway as I have wept in my red wine 🍷 I have finished off these Arabs.

A very simple paint job, but is works when they are a whole unit, just for a change I gave them a more consistent colour scheme for the shields, as the last unit I am happy with some, others less so. They are Gripping Beast figures I think bought as a very cheep lot at a show, I like these figures more so than the Black Tree Arabs partly because they have the shields attached. One more full unit of Arabs to complete🙂

Dark Ages from skirmish to massed battles

With my ACW project progressing well as you can see with the latest confederate unit I have filled a whole box 😀

I have been pondering where next to put some effort in, I am not quite ready for a whole new period so have been musing as you do on which of my current projects I could expand. There are several but I have decided to get stuck back into the dark ages.

All of my figures have originally been based for skirmish games but after much consideration I have purchased some 3x2 movement trays to allow them to be ranked up. This seems to give the most possible flexibility as they can be arranged in a number of ways. As shown in the previous post the completed Arthurian force can easily fit into my Saxon army.

With the new movement trays 18 man units seem to give reasonable feel for scale, they are of course spread out slightly thinner than I would like but I have a few double based figures which you can’t really see in the photo which definately help give a more cluttered feel, if I was looking to play a really large battle I could squeeze a few Vikings into the ranks as well.

The second force I am interested in is my Normans, they are woefully behind but luckily I have at least a unit and a half in the pile which would bring them upto 4 infantry units. I guess I am going to need another box of conquest cavalry...some time

Finally I am working on my Arabs no photo yet but I am obsessed with 11 Century Al Andalusia at the moment. I have lots of Arabs collected and ready to paint🙂

Skirmish in the desert : Crescent and Cross

It has been a short while since I posted anything, work (an unfortunate necessity to fund my hobby) real life and resting after the Dumfries game mean I haven’t hosted a battle in the Dungeon for a couple of weeks. I have however been painting, more of that later today if I pull my finger out and take a photo.

Anyway a few weeks ago we played another game of Crescent and Cross using the new SAGA rules. Looking for something quirky we played with two quite complicated factions the Spanish and the Arab Religious fanatics. We also managed to pick out a very complicated scenario which involved capturing quarters and gaining victory points at the end of each turn. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it  but we probabaly won’t be playing this scenario again. However, I did take a couple of photos and it was nice to get the slowly growing Crusader collection on the table.

The scenario has both factions scattered across the battlefield

The objective is to dominate each quarter with overwhelming numbers and it soon became clear this was extremely difficult to do

But the camels got stuck in ......

Crusader crossbowmen took up a central position

Very happy still with the new desert terrain mat

Don’t rate their chances much 🙂

After a couple of hours of chess like manoeuvring and some rough and tumble combat darkness settled over the desert and we had a draw

Ok not the best scenario but a good workout for the 🧠 

I will post some paining updates later 😛

A new SAGA begins........

Again this was played a week or so ago. Paul had picked up a copy of the new SAGA rules. You can see a more detailed review of the changes on his Hobby Horse Blog. I am not planning on rushing out to get the new rules as this seems an unwarranted expenditure. The changes are for the most part fairly sensible and simplify some aspects of the game. What became apparent as we played through the game with Vikings and Saxons is the board had been tweaked and the Saxons boosted quite a bit. Now this can been seen as a good thing or not depending on your approach to gaming. The SAGA game as a whole remains one of our favourites although the system in a true oxymoron doesn’t in my view lend itself to campaigns.

Anyway here are a few shots of the game we played 🙂

Saxons on the right the rules encourage the Saxons to have larger units to get various bonuses

The Vikings use their first turn to rush forward, they proved to be over eager and with a slightly more aggressive Saxon board they paid an early price

A unit of the Saxon warriors has rushed across the open ground decimated a unit of Vikings and run through to attack the lightly armed Viking bowmen

Eventually around the cross the Viking elite troops charged knocking the Saxons back and almost killing the Saxon Warlord but he clung on just

A lone Viking awaits his fate !

He is duly despatched to Valhalla 

And in true saga style the two warlords clash on the open ground

Take that Viking scum......😀

So we had a good game and it was interesting to see how the new boards had altered the balance of the game. There was nothing wrong with the original rules. Some of the changes are sensible for example a slight simplification of fatigue, I suspect the majority of changes have been driven by competition play which is not always good. But we’ll keep playing 😀