Attuning with the ancient gods : Ritual 28

Rummaging through my lead pile I found three wounded vikings, from a Ragnarok Miniatures Kickstarter, that I thought could pass for worshippers bowing or lying prostrate in front of an idol. I needed a forth member for this team, and found a Bard from Footsore miniatures that fits well.

A simple paint process of speed and contrast paints resulted in some decent looking miniatures, if I do say so myself.

For a while I was stumped for team two, but then I remembered that I had some figures that would probably fit the bill from a Ana Polanšćak / Andrew May Kickstarter. These are the four from that range that I picked.

I decided that I wanted these to look as though they could be people in costumes, rather than spooky forest dwellers, so the horse head spooks had their spindly legs removed before they were painted making them quite convincing mari lywd.

Once again, the paint job was quick and dirty, although I did want to embellish the expanse of white sheets so I free handed a few symbols and lines on them.

Keep your younglings occupied for half an hour by giving them access to liberal amounts of PVA glue, static grass and a square piece of hardboard.

The two worshipping bands have been set up on opposite sides of the board, and 8 attunement tokens (dice) have been found.

It’s moves all round. The ‘monsters’ having 4 activation points to the vikings 6 in round 1, with a reversal of fortune in round 2.

Round 3 sees the monsters get into position, a rough square around the sacred tree, an successfully attune one worshipper. In round 4 the vikings manage to strip that and attune one of their own.

We trade attunement in round 5, the monsters could have won but for shocking dice rolls and end their turn with two attuned worshippers. The vikings are praying with tactics in mind and spend almost all their activation points to disturb one of the attuned monsters, and in a fluke add another for themselves.

In round 6 the monsters get the maximum amount of activation points and powerful prayer sees all the congregation attuned. The game is won, my son is happy.

Ritual 28 was my first taste of a non combat game. It took 20 minutes from start to finish to play with my 9 year old, which is perfect for his attention span.

The game play isn’t in depth at all, so there’s not a lot to go back for although I will suggest a rematch to my kids on the next rainy weekend.

As a project it was perfect for me. It gave me a reason to paint 8 miniatures and a terrain piece that I had liked enough to buy but hadn’t got around to painting, it got my kids involved in the hobby and I got a Golden Button ( thanks guys).

So now it feels like it’s getting a bit warmer my hobby room won’t be too cold to spend the evenings in I’m coming out of hibernation and looking for a new project.