SAGA Wargames Rules

by Alex Buchel
Studio Tomahawk/ Gripping Beast
www.grippingbeast.com

Reviewed by Dr Ryan Lavelle. Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Winchester

University.

Gripping Beast's bid for world domination continues apace with the release of an innovative
new system of rules, specifically designed for skirmish gaming in and around Viking-Age
Britain. The rules are a stunning example of Dark-Age Entente Cordiale, as the brain-child
of French gamer Alex Buchel, developed with Jean-Baptiste Folley of Studio Tomahawk and
the boys from Gripping Beast. They are published at the same time in both English and
French editions (the French edition by Studio Tomahawk). They use a system of dice
allocation on 'Battle Boards'. A set number of dice is used for a limited number of units on
the tabletop, and each player must think about how the dice can best be deployed
according to what the forces need to do that turn. The player needs to allocate dice to a
particular unit in order to activate them to do anything (which means that a unit might be
able to move more than once but, if the gods of the dice don't favour the player, the unit
might languish, unable to do anything for a turn). But the beauty of the mechanisms of the
game comes from the fact that the dice can be used more cunningly, to give bonuses when
attacking, for example, or even placed on the board to be used in the opponents' turn
against their units (or, as the Battle Boards are visible to both players, to threaten to act,
which is often important enough!).

The dice are cleverly designed to give a flavour of the period: the names given to the
special skills are related to aspects of the period. The fact that the Viking player uses
appropriately patterned runic dice to invoke the names of Norse gods and goddesses is a
one such example (though read about the meaning of casting runes in Norse mythology
and you might feel a little uncomfortable with what you’re doing!). The game and the
rulebook is peppered, appropriately enough, with quotations from Icelandic sagas. But
when the player is thinking about how to place particular dice on the battle board in order
to do something or counteract an opponent's move or anticipated move, does it feel like
warfare in the period? In a strange way, it does. I came to the gaming table expecting it to
feel like a game; and, to an extent it is just that as two distinctly decorated A4-sized ‘Battle
Boards’ are a significant presence on the table. Still, although gameplay is the obvious
dominating factor, there is a degree of simulation of action present, too. The gamer has to
think carefully about what to do with fatigued units, and how to motivate forces to strike.
Each of the dice may give the appearance of a magic power bestowed by capricious gods
(not too far from the way some medieval warriors may have thought), and it is in this
respect that the miniatures game resembles a board game, but the game deals with the
motivations and abilities of warriors at the time, or at least as they might be seen in the
literature of the age. For example, as a wargamer brought up on morale and panic tests, I
was very interested in the notion that it is seemingly impossible to get a force to run away.
Troops disengage from combat but they don’t go far, and, if not too fatigued, can come
back into action pretty quickly. How realistic this is is questionable, as it seems to suggest
that the rules are trying to recreate figures from literature rather than some tangible
battlefield.

Of course, the ‘Dark Age’ wargamer might counter that when we game the Viking Age
we’re not trying to reconstruct or simulate a historical reality but we’re interested in the
heroics of the sagas of the day. How could I complain when the rules are called Saga, after
all? That, for me, is a big concern. Vikings figure large but they are the Vikings as
thirteenth-century Icelanders saw them, complete with the usual mythical Berserker rages,
rather than the more pragmatic warriors of a Viking Age made up of more shades of grey
than the later literature suggests. That would, of course, be a little dull. The designers
eschew army lists in their pages, which makes good sense in many ways as I have always
thought army lists in this period to be a little artificial when we are relying on a large
amount of informed guesswork, and the sense of the differences between different groups
of warriors is on their Abilities on the battlefield as determined by the Battle Boards and
special dice (which does, admittedly, cause difficulties if you wish to fight a battle between,
say, two Norman or two Welsh forces, both of which are perfectly historical scenarios). The
sense of playing a boardgame was, for me, counter-acted by the fact that the game
requires a great deal of thought about each unit and their position on the battlefield in a
fashion which linked both the Battle Board and the tabletop itself. Although I might not
agree ‘historically’ with some of the particular choices of attributes (and terminology –
‘Anglo-Danish ceorls’ should really be Anglo-Saxon thegns...), the game really forced me to
think about how small groups of men might be motivated in a confrontation – whether to go
with the impetus of potential victory or hold back for the moment, keeping a dice on a
particular square on the Battle Board, to ensure that the small group of warriors remains
confident, not too tired, and ready to act if the moment arises. It gave the player a way of
thinking about those driving motivations, the preparations of battle without either over-
simplifying it or over-detailing the skirmish to a level of determining whether a particular
figure thrusts or parries in phase 3 of the first half of their turn. In Saga, a player might be
theoretically able to keep sending a group of warriors forward but with fatigue tokens piling
up they will quickly become exhausted and will need to rest before being able to do
anything again. And if resting they become vulnerable, even pretty useless. No need for
morale rules, then, you might say as warriors fighting at full steam can exhaust themselves
pretty quickly; the gamer takes the decisions on behalf of their warriors. In effect, the nerve
of the gamer represents the morale of the forces. It’s a fair solution. Therefore each player
needs to think carefully about the balance between taking the initiative and keeping their
cool. It’s almost as if rolling the dice and making decisions about how they are deployed is
a symbolic equivalent of being able to shout and encourage one’s own warriors on the
table as well as to shout insults at the enemy. The point is that, although not all early
medieval warfare was the static warfare of shieldwall against shieldwall, where such
confrontations took place, the shoving and pushing and downright bloody mess may not
always seem to be the most interesting stuff for a wargame on a tabletop (miniatures
wargames often being better suited to mobile warfare). Although I think these rules are
some way from any historical reality (whatever that is!), they give a sense of the flavour of
the early medieval battlefield, and that is the best that anyone can say about a set of
wargames rules.

Is the whole set worth £25? As the author of a hardback book which retails at over twice
that price, I realise how close I am to throwing stones in my own glasshouse here, but the
price warrants comment. The whole 72-page A4 booklet with four full-colour cards of the
same size strikes me as pushing the price toward the higher end of reasonable.
Notwithstanding an occasional typo, it is beautifully produced and full of wonderful
illustrations, many of which serve to demonstrate examples of the process of the game and
don’t break up the usability of the ruleset. An index would have been nice, of course (and it
would be great if GB might do a YouTube recording to run us through a sample turn, as it
took me some time to get my head round those battle boards – I wouldn’t have liked my
first experience of the game to have been against an experienced player who gave no
quarter!) but it is the fact that to buy the accompanying dice we then have to pay an
additional £12 per set that leaves me reeling from the fact that one has little change from
fifty quid by the end of it. Don’t feel that gameplay relies on the full deal, however. It is
perfectly possible to play using ordinary dice (or, as I have done, modify some blank dice
bought from one of many role-playing-games specialists – Studio Tomahawk helpfully
include a PDF file for printing on adhesive paper, which is much easier than trying to
redraw the dice designs with a permanent marker... trust me!). And the £25 for the set of
rules is rather like considering the cost of a computer game: you’re not just buying the DVD
and packaging but the price is determined by the development costs, the expertise which
has gone into producing it. And when you think of it like that, this set of rules is worth every
penny.

Ryan Lavelle