Saga "The Old Worldish"

Well, that was a journey! A great thing about this great hobby is how it takes you down some wonderful historical rabbit holes.

What started as a pleasant reading of the rules with a glass of wine while waiting for my friend down the pub ended up taking me from the Lower Paleolithic area to the modern-day Olympics as well as learning the Norse for Javelin – which is frakka.  I found this fascinating, she less so.

Looking at the rules I believe that the advantage of bows are range (Long as opposed to Medium for javelins) and stopping power and the advantage of javelins are manoeuvrability and better in melee if it comes to it. Just a quick aside there are only 4 measurements in SAGA:

• Long
• Medium
• Short
• Very Short

Now, there is nothing on Viking Battle Board that is going to help my shooting in anyway, but that being said, the idea of any army without some sort of missile weapon sits ill with me. Now the Vikings did have bows but when I think of Viking Hordes (Hollywood Vikings at least) I don’t think of bows. I do however think of spears. And you can throw spears so let’s go with Javelins.

To be fair if you are strong enough you can throw most weapons. Probably not recommended however as you will quickly find yourself disarmed… followed rapidly by dismembered and disembowelled.

So, I was kindly given my first Viking utilisation tips from a member of the OTT SAGA Pantheon (who probably started playing SAGA before Llyod but maybe not Ben). In short, don’t just put your Berserkers front and centre but use them like a “Scud Missile” on an already weakened unit.

As the berserkers are unarmoured because they berserkers – though reading about this it seems to be a misconception brought about by that rascal Snorri Sturluson who misheard bear for bare. An easy mistake to make I am sure you will agree, but I digress. Anyway, I was thinking of using the javelin levy to soften up a unit and then charge in with the Berserkers. I need to read up on whether you can charge through friendly units in SAGA as ideally, I would use the levy as a screen.