Filled with purpose, the forces of “Mourning Wood” rise from slumber…
My gaming opportunities have been thin on the ground for the last few years, for multiple macro and micro reasons. “Nightwatch” was one of the games that I definitely did not want to fall through the cracks.
L to R: “Kint”, “Widd” and “Teeth” (Hirelings), Guild Mancer “Helga Moneypfennig”, suspected Bretonnian spy “Derek” and Guild Blade “Byron Maiden”
Nightwatch is a co-op miniature wargame, with a flowchart AI approach to the waves of bad guys that attack a small group of PCs. If there was a miniatures game of the Vermintide video game series (itself almost a reskin of the Left 4 Dead series) then it would probably look a lot like Nightwatch.
Last weekend I got together with The BazPaz in his newly prepped indoor/outdoor gaming space for some socially distanced gaming. Having talked about it for a couple of years, we decided to give some of our recently painted figures a run out in Saga: Age of Magic, our first ever look at Saga of any variety.
My force was made out of some of the various ghoul figures that I have been painting recently, fielded as an “Undead Legion” Saga force. The Bazpaz used the lovely faery force that he has been working on for over a year now, on and off, made up primarily of Citadel Sylvaneth, with some Wargames Atlantic Fauns, as a “Lords of the Wild” warband.
Neither force had ever hit a gaming table before, and no game of any variety had ever been played in that precise location before, so it was a session of firsts.
The poorly photographed Grymwatch advance up the East flank
Saga has a significant amount in common with Warcry, another game that I really enjoy. Without going into too much detail, each game has a resource management element based on assigning a number of dice at the start of each turn. Mechanics like that can sound dull, but when they are used to make your feverish, naked cannibal half-dead post-humans pay no heed to casualties and chow down on their opponents at a critical juncture, they are a lot of laughs.
The Bazpaz drafted a number of the “spite” models included in the Sylvaneth range to make up a “Swarm”, exclusive to his “Lords of the Wild” faction.
Saga does a very good job of providing a solid, common base of rules that can be picked up fast, so that the players can focus on actually playing the game. I love this approach to game design. I am very excited to play more Saga soon, and I am tuning my hobby time towards it.
All in all an excellent gaming visit, after a significant social drought. I’m already prepping more Undead Legions for next time.
With a name like that, readers would be forgiven for assuming that this post was part of a series, possibly followed by “Hobbits from Hobbiton” and maybe preceded by “Free-peoples from Freepeopletown”, but it isn’t.
I’m excited about the upcoming release of Stargrave, so I dropped everything else that I was working on for a while, struck while enthusiasm was high, and put my own spin on a bucket list set of terrain.
