In an effort to prepare for running Midgard at Tentcon, I convinced a good friend to skip a game of Chain of Command 2 with me to instead play Midgard, but with fantasy elements.

Okay, okay. In reality we both got pretty hyped up after a demo I gave someone else earlier in the week. Specifically, for me, my opponent in that demo had a line of Irish skirmishers standing in front of his warriors as my Vikings charged. He asked me what he should do: evade or take the charge so he could counter charge after? I told him the answer was obvious: he should evade. That’s what the army was built to do. I almost immediately realized how wrong I was: you could do either. There was a good debate there and far more nuance than I had first given credit.

Back to the fantasy guy. He came up with a whole “Sorrowful kingdom, driven by the grief of an era long lost” thing and I decided to paint up some sluaghs (Irish, short for ‘host of the dead’) to test out some fantasy elements in Midgard.

What I found is that I greatly underestimated Midgard as a system. While we did have to reference the rules a few times it was overall very smooth and easy to play. We played very different armies and it showed on the tabletop. His grief stricken warriors held back and dared me to charge into their arrows, while his dragon anchored down on one of my flanks alongside some heavy cavalry to threaten me from across the river.

After a swooping attack by his dragon, I tried to throw my ghosts at the problem and failed pretty spectacularly with some rough rolls.

This effectively cost me the match–though had it succeeded it would have opened up a route to charging his archers with my mostly warrior based, very traditional Irish force. You know, aside from the ghosts and the druid casting spells.

The spells were also interesting–the game has a large number of spells and they’re actually pretty unique in different and interesting ways. There’s only one direct offensive spell and the remainder are dedicated to affecting the battlefield, morale, or positioning. It’s a very well thought out system and I had a lot of fun thinking it through and engaging with it.

I’m a little concerned flyers are pretty clearly very strong. If you’re playing the fantasy game you need to have an answer to them–but then again I would have ended up feeling the same way about the heavy cavalry he flanked with. Obviously, you need an answer to heavy cavalry in a melee oriented ruleset–why would flyers be any different?

Honestly, the magic alone was a lot of fun. I could see using it in historical scenarios but sticking to ‘spells’ that can be explained in an earthly manner. My druid encourages his men to hold fast, so they get extra 1D6 saves or he threatens the enemy with a spell and they fight a little worse because they believe it. It was an excellent wrinkle to add to the game.

I look forward to playing a lot more Midgard, I hope. After this game I sat down and drafted up a concept for a low-to-mid fantasy army. They’re a local tribe with the blood of a dead god infecting them, causing them to turn demonic in battle and stay that way. Ostracized by the world for looking like monsters, they embrace this ability because it’s necessary for their survival. Between battles, they live normal lives and celebrate their godmarked. You may stay a demon in form, but you never stop being a father, a wife, or a tanner between battles. I intend to use the One Page Rules daemons of war for the demons and I’m still debating how to do the humans–leaning toward using some Saxon models I have to represent those seeking to become godmarked in battle so they can better defend their home.

Okay, yeah–I live for this stuff. Midgard has shown more depth than I had originally anticipated. I may just need to accept that rank-and-flank has more merit than I think.