Dipping a toe into One Page Rules - Age of Fantasy

This week at club I had my planned game of One Page Rules Age of Fantasy (AoF). As detailed previously we were playing at 1500 points and unlike myself who was taking exactly the same models as my previous Age of Sigmar (AoS), my opponent wisely decided to pad his list out with extra models and ended up with 10 or 11 unit drops.

The mission structure is defined in the starter rules and involves placing a random number of objectives on the table, in our case 3. Victory is determined by controlling the most objectives at the end of turn 4. Control of an objective is determined at the end of each turn by having models within 3″ and control persists even when units move away.

The game was really enjoyable in general and despite being entirely new to both the core rules and the armies we finished the full 4 turn game.

The result was a draw which I felt I had to fight hard for.

The rules overhead is so much less than AoS it is difficult to describe how much easier it is to take decisive actions and resolve dice rolls.

Unlike AoS the first player in each turn is determined by the player who finished activating in the previous turn. As a gamer I much prefer knowing information like this rather than having it determined by the throw of a die even when it is going against me. Knowing this information, I feel, allows far more strategic and tactical play.

The sheer preponderance of dice rolling and randomness in game events in AoS becomes starkly obvious when you step away to play a different system like Age of Fantasy.

In the spirit of balance and fairness, it is worth saying that my army did not feel as flavourful or evocative as it does with the Age of Sigmar rules and the complex structure of the A0S missions with Grand Strategies, Battle tactics and in-game objectives is  a nice puzzle to solve. In fact my opponent and I did discuss modifying the AoS mission system for use within Age of Fantasy.

I am absolutely certain I will be returning to Age of Fantasy again, although as mentioned in my previous post, my lack of Blue Horror and Brimstone models in this list was an issue. An issue my opponent was very gentlemanly in helping me get around with any proxy that was to hand (mainly dice), but an issue none the less.

In summary I would wholeheartedly recommend someone try Age of Fantasy as an alternative way to use their Age of Sigmar models should they feel disillusioned with the system.