Per usual: a game I don’t play enough. Per not usual: I’ll hopefully be playing more soon! I got a game of Saga in after work with a coworker/friend. I’ve hesitated to make Saga our after work game, if only because it’s an ugly, ugly game and I can’t really show off how pretty miniatures gaming can be when my board looks like, well… this.

That said, it’s a fun game regardless. I played the Milites Christi board from the Age of Crusades book and my opponent played Romans from Age of Invasions. I’ve never played my board before and he has played only his board for the last several months.

That’s my polite way of saying I got wrecked.

But the armies were pretty!

This crusader force really is one of my nicer looking armies and my opponent’s army was no slouch. So how did the game go? Actually, not as terrible as I make it sound. I managed to get next to no casualties for two turns but failed to capitalize. The Milites Christi board is very elite, as it turns out, and I underestimated it. I should have had even less models, with multiple large hearthguard units running around, which is not something I’ve tried in Saga before.

I had the chance of victory but my opponent used my fatigue to cut all my riders to S movement repeatedly, which stopped me from making contact and ultimately allowed his archers to do their job. Having not played much Saga beyond one opponent years ago now, it never occurred to me how much you could use fatigue to stop an enemy’s plan outright.

It’s one of those things that makes the game so darn abstract but interesting. It’s a fun puzzle in a way. How do you use your ability board and your opponent’s fatigue together to generate a successful plan? The core issue is it has nothing to do with real tactics. It was not necessarily unwise of me to start by rushing my horses into combat. The unwise part was my choice of target–had I chosen differently I may have just won the game by successfully making contact and eliminating some archers.

I get why people bounce off this game. My sensibilities these days actually incline me against it in a way–I no longer enjoy this abstract play quite as much as I used to. But I have to acknowledge there’s this “Aha!” moment that occurs when you figure out and pull off the wombo combo. Line up the horsey boys, choose the right combination of skills, and eliminate an enemy unit to devastating effect. It’s fun in a Magic: The Gathering way but not really a traditional wargame way.

Ah well, I had fun. We’ll get more games in. I do think it’s a design worth playing and I think it achieves the goal it sets for itself–which is really to create a historically themed very competitive abstract game about managing risk. At its heart it’s fun–but if the above description put you off, it isn’t for you.

But hell, at least it let me put this army down again. I really need to get around to choosing a Midgard scenario for them. Something set in Iberia, probably. We’ll see–it’ll be real pretty, if nothing else.