Quick Look: SAGA – Age Of Magic
April 15, 2019 by dracs
The third universe book for Studio Tomahawk’s Saga Second Edition brings the skirmish game out of history and into the realms of the fantastical.
This book brings about a number of interesting and exciting developments for Saga. The addition of new unit types for the game including war machines, creatures, and monsters, alongside new rules for black powder weapons, fliers and, perhaps most importantly, magic.
Like previous universe books, building your warband is a simple matter of one point per unit. Unlike its predecessors, however, Age of Magic provides you with the option to drop parts of units to select additional creatures, monsters, and heroes. This gives a real flexibility that the other books don’t have currently.
The book itself contains the new rules, along with the six faction lists to build your warband, each of which has a name and playstyle, but beyond that, the only limit is your imagination. Just because something is listed as being a fishman army doesn’t mean that you can’t imagine a tide of golems, or dryads serving the exact same function.
As always, the strength of Saga is in the Battleboards and Age of Magic is no exception. The six accompanying Boards give the playstyle a unique feel to your force on the tabletop, allowing you to decide how to activate and engage your opponent within the limits imposed by the fickle Dice Gods.
Finally, we have the Grimoire, listing all thirty-six spells available to the various mystics and enchanters in the Age of Magic. While available separately, these are printed in full at the rear of the book for reference, or to be photocopied or scanned to make your own cards. The magic system is simple and you will always manage to get your spells away, but sometimes not without consequences. This gives the magic users real presence on the tabletop and, in a fantasy setting, I think it’s only right.
I think it’s a fantastic set of rules and has resulted in many an old miniature being dusted off with a view to making it back to the tabletop with a new lease of life in the Age of Magic.
What will your Saga be?
"Just because something is listed as being a fishman army doesn’t mean that you can’t imagine a tide of golems, or dryads serving the exact same function."
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Looks very interesting. Do you need to have SAGA 2 as well, or is this a stand alone rule set?
As Gerry said in the video the separate rulebook is the basic game and you buy the period supplements as you go
The basic rulebook is £10 and the Age of Magic supplement is £30.I think the dice are £12 a set
Yeap. Although you can buy blank dice for 25p and sticker them or even use regular d6. Only the rules are necessary
I can’t wait to get my Oathmark dwarves up to scratch for this. Just need to figure out how to build them (especially since I want a mostly foot army with not too many monsters… and I need to find a suitably dwarfish bolt thrower that fits)
My Girlfriend loves collecting the strange creatures, shes got screamers, gryphhounds and those deer riding elves. Reckon there is a chance she could run an army in saga with her odd collection of creatures?
There are certainly options to squeeze in plenty of monsters and creatures in the wild list.
You need the Core and this book. So, $45 just to start.
True, but then the armies you probably already own or don’t cost much to pick up if you buy beyond Games Workshop for example.
So, it’s a weighty investment true…but it’s still got its benefits.
I asked my local shop and it is actually $60 for the main core book and the AoM supplement. So, true, you can use your existing miniatures (pretty much what I have been doing for Frostgrave/RoSD) however it is a tough sell to get my friends to also invest the $60 for the rule books which have the boards that are required. I have to look around if there are any groups playing SAGA to begin with. It will be hard to find someone to play against. I like the Fantasy bit, I will have to find others who do… Read more »
Could split the cost of the Rulebook etc with a group – you’d only need the one if you didn’t mind sharing. But yes, it could well be a big investment for a group if they ended up not enjoying it.
Now this has got my interest looking forward to the lets plays.
I’ve already got this on order. Just waiting for it to ship.
I was a bit ambivalent about this when I heard a while back about there not being any specific faction boards/lists, but watching this has made me a lot more interested in it. Just got to decide how best to represent my Chaos Dwarfs now*. 😉 *one idea I’ve just had while watching, considering the mix of Dwarfs and hobgoblins/greenskin slaves the CD have would be possibly do a sort of multiplayer game; ie each side has two battle boards, but only one player, that way one board can be the Dwarfs and the others the slaves (for smaller games… Read more »
underearth and horde would work well. Your base game is 8 points as you can imagine, 6 points and a sorceror and maybe a hero or monster. Scaling up should be very easy
Is 8pts base for all Saga these days or just AoM? From what I can recall back when it first started most games were 4-6 points (of course I have a shoddy memory so might be misremembering things).
AoM base 8, regular 6 points, with 8-10 being big games.
I’m sorry tto be the naysayer here, but I am a bit skeptical. I play saga & kings of war on a regular basis, so the problem I have is the generalization. It seems you can have dwarves and elves playing with the same battle board?, or barbarians and orcs with the same board. This dilution doesn’t seem very productive to diversity of forces. I mean dwarves ate meant to be slower bit tougher, elves faster but slightly more fragile etc. AOM seems to miss the mark on this point. Normal saga armies all have distinct boards. I would have… Read more »
fair point, I like how they’ve chosen to do it though, if you think about the wealth of armies out there already there is no way they would ever cover them all. This way you can find the board that works for you and use your army.
Even if you played elves against dwarfs with the same boards your army composition would be different and they would still play differently in and of themselves.
Like Nightrunner I am a player of Saga and Kings of War (well massive fanboy is probably a better description) and one of the things I love about Saga and loathed about KoW was that whilst both had forces that felt very distinctive, played very differently and all had definite strengths and weaknesses, there was plenty of flavor in the Saga factions but the KoW factions were so generic that a Dwarf really didn’t feel so different to an elf or a human etc. I worry that AoM will fall into the ‘generic’ armies trap of being extremely versatile, but… Read more »
I don’t play Saga but I am sure it would be easy enough to create your own battlenoards after playing a few games to get a feel for the rules
I’m glad someone shares my concerns. I think the game will work well with human mythalogical fantasy. For example Greeks with minotaurs and satyrs against celts with giants etc. As long as the basic troops are all human. But as you said, the lack of racial profile diversity seems troublesome.
This is great: the Erewhon/Dragon Rampant army I’m accumulating is now a Erewhon/Dragon Rampant/Age of Magic army. I’m so hobby-time efficient!
that’s what I said. It’s like when I bought those dark age irish buildings that doubled up for Star Wars, really I was saving money by getting them over two separate ranges. Now all my armies are lining up.
Great review, thank you Gerry.
This is definitely added to my shopping list.
Awesome, really looking forward to my copy. To me personally the vaguely defined army lists are a godsend as I have tons of painted and unpainted fantasy mini’s that don’t always fit in the fantasy games that I play. This system is also a great opportunity to pick up some Age of Sigmar models. I’ve got a number of fantasy armies that I’m building up for Kings of War based around my own fantasy setting, but they require 100+ mini’s (per army) to be painted. With SAGA AoM I’ll have a chance to field a playable force without having to… Read more »
you have twisted my arm! Gonna have to take the plunge. One thing I would ask though is, would (in your own opinion) you go straight for age of magic as a newcomer to saga or would it be better to start with the other supplements? I know the basic ruleset is required as well.
I think you can jump straight into AoM; learning how to use the battleboards/assign dice will be just as easy as with the historics ones, as would basic army comp – from what Gerry describes I think you could easily use say a Crusader warband directly without the need for including any actual fantasy elements. The various things like magic, exchanging models to get heroes/monsters, war machines, etc sound like optional extras, so if you wanted you could start without any of those things to get to learn the rules, then add them in gradually as you become more familiar… Read more »
the rules are the same for all the games so it’s really up to you. If you plan on just playing AoM then go straight for it. The rule book itself is a 40 page softback so it’s incredibly easy to pick up and learn. If you think you fancy playing the historics as well you can pick up the universe book for it later on or if you want to run a Viking army with norse monsters, or a crusader force with pegasus and wizards, it means you can make one force for two games with only the addition… Read more »
yeah I was looking at the crusades but as you both say if I can use that for the both thats awesome
you definitely can, I don’t think I showed the Great Empire photo, but they built it out of Fireforges crusader models and just added some pegasus knights and a wizard.
this looks interesting, but I already have Frostgrave and Open Combat so I doubt I’ll be picking this up, too many rule systems on the market all competing for the same player base.
I think that’s were Saga may struggle, but if they make headway since they have one rule set that can fit multiple periods it could actually become a go to system. Already if I want to play from 400CE – 1400CE then I can do that with Saga, add in AoM for fantasy now and that’s 4 distinct periods. I expect we’ll see Feudal Japan, Ancients and maybe pike and shotte without too much issue.
At that point it’s a single set of rules for multiple periods and that’s were it’s strength lies.
Also add in the fact that Mortal Gods is going to add a mythical element later in the year as well. Choice and competition can only be a good thing as companies can’t release any old crap and get away with it plus we benefit with the ever increasing choice of models. Fantasy is a buyers market at the moment.
Never played Saga, but I can see the appeal of the game. Also while there is a bit of an initial investment in the rulebooks, you get an awful lot of “bang from your buck” as your army can be used for a multitude of games. Another game an army for Age of Magic would fit into is Of Gods and Mortals. In this game, your force is led by a god, you can add a limited number of legendary characters and the rest of your force is made up of mortals. So a Celtic force could be Cernunnos as… Read more »
I have Of Gods on my shelf beside me it’s a little cracker.
OKAY @avernos !! Fine. I give up, you’ve worn me down. 😛 😉 Between you and @lloyd constantly talking it up. I went and plonked down a thick stack of monies and got myself into SAGA Age of Magic from the start. The core book, AoM, sticks, the whole deal. I didn’t even see this video until after I made the order.
So I guess the two of you can start chanting “One of Us!!” now 😛 😛 😛
Are the books for sale in the US?
@bors77 I heard Badger Games will be selling it
https://shop.badgergames.com/category.sc?categoryId=463
Never played SAGA but have always been keen to try it out and as I have a heap of Confrontation dwarves and goblins lying about, this is the perfect excuse to start 🙂
Nice overview, got this on order to shrink down my fantasy forces. Was unsure on this or Warlords of Erehwon but the flexibility of list building for this has won out
I always hate to bring back old threads but here we are.
Currently trying to get my group to try saga. We would be interested in the fantasy setting so core rules and fantasy book are for sure. What I don’t know is how many and what types of dice would be needed. Typically 3 of us play so just looking for advice on what dice would be needed to play. A magic set or 3? And 3 sets of fantasy dice I suppose? As I have never played not exactly sure what to get so help will be appreciated.