WFC's First Tournament!

 I've been down at the club all day today, at Wargames Free Company's first tournament, "Winter is Coming" - a Saga all day event.

Over the day we had four games to play, so here's the very quick run down of how I did...

The first game was a straightforward fight - a clash of warlords against Andy's Vikings. I thought I did pretty well in this, and during this game I realised that the combination of being able to change the facings of dice, add fatigue to enemy units and remove models from exhausted enemy units from the Anglo-Dane battleboard is pretty potent. It's countered by the Vikings' abilities to remove fatigue though, so you have to be able to do everything in a single turn against them or they'll remove the fatigue (and gain bonuses doing so!).
I think we were pretty evenly matched during this game, but Andy beat me on victory points - if I'd just kept my levies safe it would have been a draw!

The second game was a duel, against Craig's Vikings. In this scenario the two warlords start next to each other in the centre of the board with 12 wounds each, and the rest of the forces are at the back of the board.
Craig went first and moved most of his warband towards the warlord, but didn't attack. On my turn I pushed two units into combat and did some damage to the warlord, but not enough to be decisive.
The remainder of the battle basically took place in the centre of the board, but neither of us really gained the upper hand, despite some close calls on either side. The eventual outcome was a minor win to Craig - his warlord had 3 wounds left to my 2.

After a surprisingly substantial lunch (half a roast chicken was involved), the third game was the escort scenario, against the (you guessed it) Vikings of Paul, a player not from the club. I was escorting, and was able to divide my opponent's forces by deploying the baggage at the extreme edges of the board. Some use of defensive abilities on the battle board and a bit of luck allowed me to wipe out the force facing me on the left flank with 2 baggage markers alive there, so I forced marched these off the board before the Vikings could regroup and won this game. You'll notice I forgot to take any pictures of this though.

The final game was the 4-way Feast for Crows scenario, against Tom's Normans, Craig's Vikings and Paul H's Anglo-Danes.
Tom's Normans dominated the early part of the game with long ranged shooting, doing lots of damage to the Vikings while the two Anglo-Dane forces faced off against one another without really getting too close. Eventually though, I closed with Paul's force and wiped much of it out, but by this point he'd already done a lot of damage to me and taken some of Tom's cavalry too. Craig managed to more or less wipe out Tom's force, but took very heavy casualties himself.
This was another close game, but eventually I finished bottom of the four of us - Paul grabbed the win, much to his own surprise!

So, I think I managed some lower-mid table mediocrity in the scores, but the highlight for me was the obvious lapse in judgement on the part of the painting judges, who awarded me the prize for best painted warband!

I had a choice of prizes, and decided on some Norman Milites. These are going to form a good chunk of my next Saga force!

I've been planning to build a Norman warband in the new year already, so this is a big help - I might even be able to play a few small games once I get these painted up and add a warlord to them. I figure I could use some old Bretonnian archers with them as well, but that's a blog post for another day...