Armello: The Board Game

It’s March 29, 2024, and I’m in the kinda unique position of reporting that a game I had a blast designing has already made a treasure-trove on Kickstarter and still has about a week to roll. It’s Armello: The Board Game, a deckbuilding adventure board game of furry animal heroes with swords questing to take the throne from their corrupt King . . . over each other’s (temporarily) dead bodies!

Armello: The Board Game is being published by friends at King of the Castle, aka the wonderful creators of Campaign Coins. I’ve been writing occasional design notes you can find in the Kickstarter page’s updates and the game has just hit a stretch goal where I’ll loop back into the game to design two fistfuls of magic Amulets. It’s time I stepped away from an all-out push to finish 13th Age Second Edition’s next playtest packet to talk about the game that’s already being crowdfunded!

This board game version of Armello inherited a huge trove of goodness from the earlier digital game from League of Geeks. The digital game originally featured on Kickstarter and was supported with new cards and hero clans and game expansions for many years. Hundreds of beautiful cards, cool custom dice with magical symbols, and cutthroat anthropomorphic animal heroes on a quest to usurp a Corrupt king has translated into a competitive deckbuilding quest-and-combat boardgame . . . though ‘translated’ isn’t the right word. I aimed to create a game in a new medium that captured the spirit and evoked the feel of the original.

Digital games can do a lot of things that aren’t repeatable on tabletop. Then midway through the design, I turned the digital game’s more traditional style of cardplay into a deckbuilding experience. Partly that’s because I love deckbuilding games. And partly it’s because deckbuilding felt like a great metaphor for character growth and experience. Each hero has their own unique starter and experience decks as well as cards they can buy from the market or win as treasure.

There are six days to go for the Kickstarter, plus some time in the post-crowdfunding phase. I’m not sure I’ll be designing for more stretch goals, but I do know that the design note I just wrote talks about a possible expansion.

If you do nothing else, check out the cool Kickstarter video! When you play the digital game, you’ll recognize the narrator as the voice of the King.

Vault of Mini Things!

Last week before our 13th Age 2E playtest, Jonathan handed me a big plastic bag full of Cardboard Heroes. They were mine, the bag I used as D&D minis and Earthdawn minis and The Fantasy Trip minis back before I mostly switched over to the pre-painted plastic figures we were making for D&D at WotC. I’d loaned the cardboard heroes bag to Jonathan ages ago when he needed more baddies for the 3e Elysombra game and the bag had been forgotten in a box of game supplies.

I spent a couple minutes rummaging through the cardboard zombies and lizardfolk and dragons, wondering which I might use. And then Sean noticed the rummage and told me about the all-grown-up version of flat-hero minis that’s being funded on BackerKit right now. It’s the Vault of Mini Things from TinkerHouse Games.

I love this project! I currently use prepainted plastic minis, and I sometimes use painted metal when it matters and I’ve got the right figure handy. I’ll be supplementing and occasionally replacing those minis with the figure in this set.

Marshall Short’s art on these figures and the various terrain settings is fantastic, and he also has a PrintableHeroes Patreon that includes VTT figures.

The Vault’s organization and storage system is clever and will pack a huge number of options into a relatively compact box.

And terrain is often the weakness of my games, and I’m excited about using this Vault’s selection of terrain either alone or supplementing maps.

The official BackerKit campaign lasts another week.

It’s worth browsing the site to see all the great minis and terrain that’s included. Here are three snippets that caught my eye: a pair of side-by-side heroes that I’d like to play as a team (frog guy! sorcerer gal!), some of the dungeon terrain, and a few of the magic items/spell effects that I definitely don’t have miniatures of anywhere else!

Kor, the Ograkshasa Monk

What does rebellion look like when dad is an ogre mage and mom is a rakshasa?

In Kor’s case, rebellion looks like obtaining magic that makes you look mostly human and studying to be a monk in a monastery run by the Dragon Emperor. Of course, many of Kor’s forms don’t look a lot like styles practiced by Imperial monks. There are limits to how straight you can be when the Black Dragon is an old family friend.

Yeah, Jonathan says this is the most-me character ever.

I used the beastblooded modifiers and the bestial fury ability from Book of Ages (page 77). When Kor (it’s kinda Rak backwards, natch) goes beasty-fury, the spell making him look human drops temporarily and you get a glimpse of the tigrish-ogre beneath. I didn’t realize I could have sung “ograkshasa ograkshasa ogra ogra ograksasa” until now.

I’m using the past tense because we were right there, deep in the Stone Thief (thanks in large part to the activities of Kor’s older sister Kyla), when Paul Hughes gifted me with the certificate that crafted Kor at HeroForge. I decided to keep Kor’s hands facing human-style, instead of trying to show him full-beast. And then my wonderful talented friend Brittany Broyles (@blondeofmystery) painted Kor. Now we know how to make sure campaigns don’t get played again: make a HeroForge mini of your character.

Still, hope remains. If not back inside the Stone Thief, some other game. Maybe I’ll get really old school and blow a character created for one campaign into another version of the Dragon Empire, like a leaf in the wind. A leaf with fangs!

(a much better photo from Brittany, with the other two minis she painted for me accompanying Kor)

The Zoomswoop Virtual Tabletop

I've been running more games than ever before during this pandemic. At the moment, I've got a usually-weekly 13th Age game and a more-or-less biweekly 13th Age Glorantha game. I realize that many people run games a lot more often than that; I can't claim to be a prolific GM!

Instead of using Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds or Astral VTT, I've been using what I call zoomswoop. For the talking and the non-combat roleplaying, I'm one of the talking heads on the group video call. When it's time to roll initiative, I swoop my camera down near a battlemap, set up the minis, and until the battle's over I play action-puppeteer with everyone's miniatures and my monsters, with occasional camera call-backs for hand gestures and body language cues.

I admit I kind of love it. When I'm responsible for moving all the miniatures, hypothetical moves and stutter-step fakes abound. The barbarians shake with rage, the necromancer cowardly turns his back as he runs away, and the dwarf ranger's loyal and ridiculously effective monitor lizard ends up leaning on its boss or climbing atop the enemies. Interpreting character actions with tiny adjustments is fun, and the players focus on their actions, their dialogue, and their smack-talk. Plus I get to pan the camera up every time the ridiculously large escalation die gains a pip. 

Two cameras would work. But using a single-camera swoop lets me keep my I'm-thinking-face off camera part of the game. People know that when I bring the camera back up to talk it's gonna be important. 

I suspect that lots of other people are doing the same thing w/o feeling the need to coin a term for it! But maybe not. My players expected to be using a virtual tabletop and some have been surprised that the zoomswoop works. 

[aftermath of the battle when the PCs caught up with the Crusader pipers who had taken the head of Inigo Sharpe into an ancient draconic battlefield; escalation die at left]

Johnny Reb, Dana Lombardy & Glorantha

As a younger dude who hadn’t entirely grown into game designer boots, in mid 1996 I got a job at Chaosium as Greg Stafford’s right-hand man for publishing Glorantha. Positioned on the right-hand, I learned that neither the left hand, nor the checking account, nor the pockets, nor any other chunk of Chaosium, had money to pay freelancers for work they produced within, oh, maybe three years if all went amazingly well. So, my Glorantha work was mostly about shutting projects down.

But Greg’s dream was that Giovanni Ingellis and his company, Stratelibri, from Italy, were going to produce a Glorantha miniatures game. Stratelibri hoped to challenge Warhammer, go big or stay home. But it wasn't something we could start working on at Chaosium. Giovanni wanted to design our Glorantha game, that was his dream, and in return he would fund it.

So I dove into the world of miniatures gaming. I’d already been turned on to a clever ancients/medieval game called Armati by Jon Kovalic, of all people, who for a brief time helped put out an Armati fanzine. But I’d missed the brilliantly abstracted DBA (De Bellis Antiquitas, which I still love) and its wooly ancestor (WRG 7^th Edition, which Charlie Krank & friends introduced me to in Charlie’s game garage). About the same time, Scott Schneider of Chicago introduced me to Great Battles of History, the GMT ancients wargame that plays a lot like a minis game with counters.

Closer to home in the Bay Area, Chaosium’s friend Dana Lombardy wanted to teach me to play Johnny Reb. I put him off for a little while. I believe I was thinking that a regimental American Civil War minis game wasn’t all that relevant to a supposed rival to Warhammer.

the rules at the time; these days some gamers prefer John Hill's newer rules, Across a Deadly Field

After work one day, Dana set up a giant battle (well, giant to me!) and we played for several hours. I'd played write-orders-then-execute-them wargames before, but Johnny Reb improved greatly on that model with face-down order counters executed in a timing sequence that created a dynamic battlefield. Dana was enthusiastic and helpful and wanted to help the Glorantha minis project take off. I remember the Johnny Reb game fondly. Which is ironic, because at the time I was nowhere near appreciative enough.

Dana, closer to now

I was caught up in the strange dance steps of preparing to produce a game that I wasn’t allowed to think about designing. Greg was focused on turning out orders of battle for the various combatants in the Hero Wars, particularly the Lunar Empire. (Some of this work has recently resurfaced in Martin Helsdon’s The Armies & Enemiesof Dragon Pass.) Giovanni of Stratelibri wouldn’t talk about the Glorantha minis game until I visited him in Italy. I thought that was unhelpful, but hey: free trip to Italy!

Giovanni, someone I'm glad to have met

The trip was delightful, Stratelibri were gracious hosts and just meeting and hanging out with Giovanni was splendid in a life/historical sense. But the minis business rolled a fumble. It turned out that Giovanni didn’t actually have time to design anything new, he planned to re-purpose a quirky little cyberpunk skirmish system he’d created years earlier. It hadn’t really worked as a cyberpunk game and I didn't think it was going to work as a Glorantha game. I hadn't really expected to challenge Warhammer but I'd at least hoped to take advantage of Greg’s work on the military histories of Dragon Pass. 

By the time I had returned to California, Giovanni had regretfully pulled the monetary plug because of a) problems with Magic: The Gathering; b) store expansion plans; c) knowing the Glorantha project wouldn’t work; d) choose your own adventure. That was when nearly everyone at Chaosium got laid off thanks to the Mythos over-printing disaster.

But back to Dana. He was on hand, helpful, and would have been one of the best people in the world to talk with about miniatures and wargame design. I stumbled along without recognizing that Dana’s presence in the project was a lucky penny that I should have flipped many times. On the bright side, my mistake wasted less of his time than if I'd understood what I was doing. 

You can find links to Dana’s doings here. If you grab a copy of Green Ronin’s wonderful 100 Best HobbyGames, edited by James Lowder (now of Chaosium!), Dana wrote up Johnny Reb on page 157.

Guest Post: On Dice Mechanics and Over the Edge

This is a guest post on  from Jonathan Tweet, who is in the last 24 hours of his Over the Edge Kickstarter with Atlas Games. I didn't directly contribute to the design of Over the Edge, but it turns out that I contributed indirectly! 

Rob’s first professional appearance at Wizards of the Coast was when he in brought an interesting skirmish miniatures game and showed it to leads in the game design group as a possible acquisition. It was designed as a Glorantha game, but it would work the same way for a Magic-based miniatures game. The special dice you rolled mostly had numbers on them, but some faces instead had runes that triggered special abilities. When you rolled the dice in this game, the numbers you rolled were important, but so were the runes. 

He brought the same approach to 13th Age, where a monster’s attack roll determines not only if it hits but also whether something else happens. For example, if a phase spider hits you with a d20 roll that’s even, it can make a second attack to steal one of your magic items. The attack roll means more than simply hitting or missing, and the gamemaster can use the same attack over and over with different results from round to round. 

The original Over the Edge from 1992 had a linear dice mechanic, where your roll of multiple dice resulted in a number that indicated how well you had performed the task being attempted. The new Over the Edge has a linear scale on two dice to determine success or failure, and it adds good twists (if a die is a 4) and bad twists (if a die is a 3). These are the surprising results, good or bad, that are part of the conflict’s resolution. The good twist and bad twist rule was the original concept that the whole dice rolling system is based on. That approach derives directly from Rob’s dice systems that provided results that were different not just in quantity or degree but in quality. 

The Kickstarter for the new Over the Edge ends Tuesday, August 14, at 11 am Pacific. 

Two snippets about Glorantha and The Gods War

Sandy Petersen's The Gods War kickstarter is ending in about twelve hours and I didn't get around to mentioning that I'd written a couple short bits about Glorantha involving that project. Even if you aren't in for the mythical battles, it's worth checking out Sandy's site for wonderful art.

Snippet #1 is something I wrote for Kickstarter and the Chaosium blog, statting up one of the miniatures from Sandy Petersen's The Gods War for 13th Age in Glorantha (you can never have too many broos).

Snippet #2 is something I wrote about growing up with Glorantha and having it become my favorite game world.

Osprey's New Wings

This isn't a blog with new news. It's an appreciation.

A few years ago Osprey Publishing started publishing miniatures wargames in book form. This probably shouldn't have been a huge surprise, since Osprey's military history line has long been a huge resource for miniatures painters and historical wargame designers. So far my two favorites in the Osprey wargame line are Lion Rampant--Medieval Wargame Rules, by Daniel Mersey, and Andrea Sfiligoi's A Fistful of Kung Fu--Hong Kong Movie Wargame Rules.

The wargame line has notably moved away from the straight historical treatments that Osprey made its name with. Andrea's book, for example, is a skirmish wargame treatment of the territory Feng Shui arranges for roleplaying games. And with the launch of the Osprey Adventures line in 2010, Osprey has a full-fledged documentary fantasy project going, with books on everything from Hercules to Zombies to Werewolves and Ken Hite's The Nazi Occult.

The catalog of about-to-be-published Osprey books is a bit like walking into the history section at the bookstore and finding yourself at a gaming convention. Chris Pramas is about to publish Orc Warfare! Phil Masters is coming out with The Wars of Atlantis. Ken is putting together The Cthulhu Wars.

In a week, two friends have Osprey books coming out that I've already pre-ordered. Ryan Miller has a naval wargame, Fighting Sail: Fleet Actions 1775-1815. And Steve Long is publishing Odin: The Viking Allfather. The artist for Odin, a Spanish woman named a-RuMor, does great stuff, and I'm keen to see Steve's treatment of Odin-through-history and Odin-in-myth.

 

Reaper Bones, broos, and frogfolk

I've been slowly unpacking my first ever box of Reaper Bones miniatures from Kickstarter. It's the Bonesylvania set. 

My first surprise came on day two. I'd pulled out one bag and opened it, taking out a mini or two whenever I needed a mental moment away from typing. I looked in the box for the second bag, pulled it out, and was surprised to find a third bag underneath. Oh! Right. 150+ miniatures, that's a lot. 

The other two pleasant surprises wouldn't have surprised me if I'd kept track of the contents. But all these months/years after backing the Kickstarter, I had no idea there were going to be such wonderful broo miniatures, and just in time for us to be working on the second playtest draft of 13th Age in Glorantha! Goat-headed Chaos monsters are just what I need right now.

So far I've found three excellent broo minis in the bags, they're pictured below next to metal Broo minis painted by my buddy Richard Bark. I think I've found my Champion of Ragnaglar at the left. If there are more broos in the bags, don't tell me. I'll find them soon!

And alongside the broos, we've got frogfolk. So far I've found three of them also, perfect for jumping into the Temples of the Frogfolk issue of the 13th Age Monthly by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan released a couple weeks ago. I love the skull helmet on the guy in the middle.

If you're not sure that frogfolk are your thing, here's a review of the piece from someone who was skeptical and then won over. I appreciate his notes about the article giving just enough information to spark the imagination and then stopping and letting the GM/players take over--that's the balance we're aiming for. As of today, Friday the 13th Age, Temples of the Frogfolk is also on sale at Drive-Thru RPG along with the 13th Age soundtrack and the Shadows of Eldolan 1st level adventure at 13% off. Offer expires Saturday the 14th. 

Commander, Cardhunter, Golem Arcana

The undercurrent for this week is miniatures-style play. 

The Commander for 13th Age

I've been working on what we used to be called the 'battle captain' class for the 13 True Ways supplement for 13th Age. I got tired of the battle-captain mouthful and renamed the class "commander." It's more direct, dodges the adjective-generated question of how many other types of captain you can play, and describes the current mechanics better. 

When I'm happy with internal playtests the commander will join the monk in wider playtest. Jonathan thinks that this version of a commander is more like a miniatures game thing than he would expect a 13th Age class to be, but I'm arguing for the fact that the ongoing carefully weighted options are a play pattern beloved by the people who want to play the commander class in the first place, so at the moment, yes, this is another class that plays unlike any of the others. 

Cardhunter

Meanwhile in the world of spending time pushing electrons on a game board instead of typing electrons into design files, I've been playing a lot of Cardhunter, the deck-based minis-style dungeon-fight game from Blue Manchu. I like this game a lot. Playing is free though they may find ways of attracting you as a Paypal. If you enjoy crunchy minis games, tactical puzzle-solving, or comedy-of-genre riffing on the cheesiest conventions of early D&D roleplaying, definitely check it out. It's been a long time since I worked with Skaff Elias on Chainmail and D&D Miniatures and I'm happy to see that he got involved as an advisor on a game that's so much fun. 

Golem Arcana

Where Cardhunter tickles old school memories with newfangled deckbuilding TCG design, Golem Arcana is the next big idea pulled from Jordan Weisman's hat. People have talked about using digital media to make a tactical miniatures game faster and easier to play. Jordan & Co. are trying to pull off the first ambitious version of such a design with an epic fantasy setting and big and beautiful 'miniatures.' The Kickstarter runs another four days and even if you're not likely to support it, you should look at the video, which does a good job of explaining some core concepts miniatures fans and game designers are going to want to keep track of. 

[[below, Golem Foundry by Kekai Kotaki]]

Fawning candy blink dogs

A couple months ago Ken Hite was putting together the monster list for the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane Press. I'd been helping with suggestions and sample monster write-ups. Then I mentioned the monsters I wasn't sure we should cover.

Dogs.

Any time D&D did a book of monsters in 3e and 3.5, you could count on a substantial portion of the contributions amounting to dogs. Go ahead, start paging through with the core Monster Manual, you'll hit the hound archon, barghest (wolflike is doglike, man), blink dog, dire wolf, gnolls (because hyenas count), and so on, up through the warg, winter wolf, and yeth hound. The monsters just get barkier in the Fiend Folio and in the old Monster Manual II, sometimes when you don't really expect it. Caniloth? That's a dog-like not-demon/not-devil. Senmurv? That's some kind of coyote humanoid with rainbow wings. As soon as you do a race sourcebook, that race has gotta have a dog. Or three. The parade of dog-like monsters keeps spooling out like a WTF multiversal dog show.

I became aware of our canine design tendency when I was choosing minis for the D&D Miniatures game. Like other powerful unconscious tendencies, dog-ness often took us by surprise. A gravehound, a werewolf, a Nessian warhound, a gnoll priestess, an iron defender and a goblin warg rider feel like different monsters. But if you squint, they're all from Canine Kennels.

The ubiquity of dog monsters isn't a surprise. We think with what's familiar. Twisting the familiar into a monster creates scary and resonant monsters. And other creators have had weird dog-fixations. Shakespeare tended to link 'fawning' in the same sentence as candy (sweetmeats, candied jellies) along with a dog or hound or mastiff, there are upwards of seven plays that feature this precise association, something like a text analysis fingerprint. Us 'd20-rolling designers? We've got an even more obvious thread: new monster concept = obvious (or just maybe stealthy) dog.

So Ken made the call to exclude dogs from the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary. It was a good call. 13th Age is aimed at imaginative GMs and players who are being encouraged to add their own cool ideas to each campaign and session. It's clear that most of us gamers can design actually-interesting dog-monsters ourselves and we've covered a few of the obvious wolves and hellhounds in the core book. We're trying to supply ideas and inspiration you might not have had immediately on your own, so throwing more dogs onto the pile just isn't necessary.

And by the hoary breath of the winter wolf, my previous work cycle created enough pre-painted plastic dog-style miniatures that you should have no problem finding minis to suit your new creations.

2 Serendipities

1
Last week my aunt and cousin visited from Wisconsin.
They drove through Oregon and visited my mother's grave in Springfield.
They ran and laughed and dodged through the cemetery, scattering in four directions every thirty seconds
because all the sprinklers were on and they were big powerful sprinklers, not the kind you want to get blasted by the whole hit.
Eventually the older generation accepted its fate and stood stoic in the spray, but the younger generation kept dodging.
A wonderful visit to my mom's grave.
I can't decide, now, if Mom would have kept dodging the water or taken the hit, if she'd been there.
When she had her mobility she liked a challenge.
But she was always the first person to say "It's only water," and accept the rain or a splashing.

2
Our friend Steve has organized or run the Cereal Thrillers breakfast cereal bar at Burning Man for years.
We helped the first year since it had somehow turned out to be my idea, but haven't been back.
This was the best year ever for Cereal Thrillers.
There are dozens of stories from this year I don't know yet, but the one I heard came from Dreamblade minis.
Every other year I've supplied a case or two of Dreamblade minis (and early on, some D&D minis as well) to be inserted in the cereal boxes as prizes. Shake a cereal box, get a freaky miniature from humanity's dreamscape, the cereal barista gets to tell a little story about the newly discovered creature.
When I started running out of minis, my olde Dreamblade co-creator Jonathan helped with a case or three.
But this year I was out. No more Dreamblade minis to give away as prizes.
Then Steve found a full case of Dreamblade sitting on the bar at Burning Man and thought it was something Jonathan had brought.
No. It was a gift from a man sitting and eating his cereal.
He had loved getting the Dreamblade minis in his cereal two other years, so this year he decided to bring a case of his own to contribute to the cereal bar.
So the tradition continues.

SAGA Review

There’s a new game I love. It’s a Dark Ages skirmish miniatures game. Wait, wait, don’t walk away! SAGA isn’t just for lead-heads: there’s a lot here for fantasy gamers and maybe even Euro boardgamers.

I wouldn’t say that about 95% of the miniatures games I’ve tried, but SAGA is a cunning hybrid. It sells itself in the miniatures gaming community as a straightforward historical game. But SAGA sets itself apart with elegant core mechanics, an exceptions-based approach to the fighting styles of four different Dark Ages cultures, and its willingness to draft elements of heroic myth.

If you’ve played historical wargames, you’ve encountered the practice of giving your units orders before the turn. SAGA brilliantly reinterprets this convention. The core mechanic is that each of the four cultures in the base game (Viking, Anglo-Danish, Norman, Welsh) has its own battle board and set of six-sided dice featuring symbols associated with that culture. At the start of your turn you roll as many SAGA dice as your warband deserves, then assign the different die results to your battleboard, giving orders to your warriors for the turn (and possibly for the enemy’s turn) to come. Some orders only require one die; others require a combination of two specific dice. Your best warriors can be activated with most any die; your worst warriors can only be activated by one of the rarer symbols.

Trading card gamers will be right at home with the ability to exploit combos and synergies while generating SAGA dice and assigning abilities. Eurogamers should recognize the tension of planning a turn of action with limited resources while choosing between direct action and abilities that can only be used during an enemy turn.

The core game statistics are dead simple. Instead of offering charts of slightly different stats for warriors who were armed and armored quite similarly, the game gives almost identical attack and defense stats to four different classes of warrior (Warlord, Hearthguard, Warrior, Levy). But the orders on the battle board, especially the culturally unique abilities that you can only use once per turn, make each of the factions fight entirely differently.

The Norman battle board is a great example. Reading the rules, I was surprised that mounted units function almost exactly like units on foot. They move faster, they have lower armor against enemy shooting and they can’t enter buildings. The abilities of mounted units don’t live in the basic rules; they live on the Norman battle board: Charge!, Terrified, Gallop and Stamping are all abilities that can only be used by the Norman’s mounted warriors, and the most powerful of them have devastating effects when they’re used against non-mounted enemies. It’s not just good game design, it’s also delightful reinforcement of the Norman’s unique advantages.

Each of the four factions play differently thanks to the interaction between their SAGA dice and their battle board. The Normans move quickly, fire crossbows well, and stomp non-mounted enemies into the dust, but they also tire quickly. The Anglo-Danish start slow but gradually wear their enemies down before making the decisive push. The Welsh use every terrain advantage to escape most direct confrontation and pepper the foe with missiles. The Vikings seek melee early and often, don’t want to fight extended battles, and most especially don’t want to have to chase lightly armored Welsh around the bogs.

The Viking battle board introduces another aspect of the game that should appeal to fantasy gamers: abilities named after the Norse pantheon. Using the Thor ability lets you fight a melee twice, using Valhalla lets use eliminate a few of your own warriors to gain immense numbers of melee attack dice that fight. Use Loki and an enemy unit of lower-grade warriors that has taken some casualties will simply melt away from the battlefield, confused or frightened or slain by the trickster god, you decide, one way or another they’re gone.

Evocative use of myth continues with the special Warlord abilities assigned to Heroes of the Viking Age. A Viking warband can spend one of its six points to have Harald Hardrada (King of Norway) or Ragnar Lothbrok (King of Sweden and Norway) as its Warlord. The other factions have their own heroes. The Hero of the Viking Age abilities are extremely powerful and different, exactly the type of thing you can build an entire warband around. But it’s only one warrior so the power balances out. SAGA’s willingness to emphasize the fun of its setting instead of getting bogged down in simulation sets it apart.

Ordinarily I look at great games and consider the ways they can be adapted for other game worlds I enjoy. Pieces of Sartarite Glorantha are the obvious choice here, and I might end up using some Orlanthi minis for SAGA. But I don’t feel the need to complicate SAGA with magic rules and the other elements it would need to mesh with Glorantha/Dragon Pass. If I use Orlanthi in SAGA, I’m more likely to draft Orlanthi into our world’s physics, to treat the Gloranthan gods similar to the way that designer Alex Buchel treated the Viking gods.

If you’re in the UK, Gripping Beast is the publisher and main SAGA distributor. In the USA, look to Architects ofWar. In France, you’re playing in the game’s native tongue thanks to StudioTomahawk, which means you’re also able to enjoy a couple other games by this designer, lucky you.