BIG Saga AoM 2

Played in my second Saga AoM tournament at Bristol Independent Gaming. The first one is here. I wasn't too impressed with my Underearth battleboard and previous games had not gone well, so I was expecting to suffer some heavy defeats. I made some last minute decisions with my warband and decided to keep my melee infantry as Warriors and field a Behemoth and a Sorceror.

Warlord

Sorceror

2* 9 Warriors with Firearms

2* 9 Warriors

3 Creatures Bipeds

1 Behemoth

I chose Slowed Time, Strengthen, and Erosion from the spell book. Slowed Time to try to get off an extra Firearms attack, coz they can be pretty devastating at close range but are hard to fire twice. Strengthen was just a defensive buff, and Erosion I brought, just in case I had to face Rich's Wild warband, which I knew would be there.

Again there were a load of well-painted armies from a decent range of factions. Out of 8 warbands there were 2 Undead, 2 Wild, 2 Kingdoms, 1 Horde, and 1 Underearth. As expected, the Undead did well.

First game I faced Jim's excellently painted horde. He smashed into me, as you would expect the Horde to do but I managed to mostly withstand the War Chariot and Berserker charges, which were his main weapons, and counter with my melee warriors. I definitely got the best of the dice and ended up with the win. I still didn't feel I had found any real play or coordination in my board and just relied on luck.

The second game I played Ben's Undead, which was the exact same warband I had played in the last tournament. I had not been looking forward to this, and didn't think I had much going for me against Undead. Istm, you need to hit the skeleton units hard with a tank unit,which my Kingdoms Hearthguard were perfect for, but my Underearth don't really have.

To my surprise, though, my board coordination worked great, I managed to sync my spells much better, and I was winning all the way through. Crucially, I got one of the 12 warrior skeleton units down to a single figure, but just wasn't able to knock off that final piece. I knew that that would come back to haunt me and on the final turn Ben's Skeleton wave finally broke and I lost three complete units in a single turn. I lost the game but was much happier with my board.

The final game, as predicted, I ended up playing Rich's Wild dark elves. They were a bit different to the last list that defeated me. He now fielded 12 mounted warriors with composite bows. This game went ok for me, as I piled my Ogres through the centre and supported them with Tenacity.

But the key to the battle was his mounted warriors, running up and pinging me and then using his Retreat activation/reaction to stop me hitting him back. It took me three turns to sort of encircle him, and I was confident I would be able to cut him off, but he cunningly 'retreated' the wrong way and grabbed my Objective marker, instead. As it happened, I did catch up with them and got some more luck in the melee, and managed to win the game by a single, probably undeserved, point.

So another great fun tournament, with three very close games that could have all gone either way. I'm very pleased with how my warband did considering how awful I felt it would do. I was thinking this would be its last appearance, but I might actually play with it again. I'm looking forward to the next BIG tournament, where I will probably field a different warband, maybe my Horde.