Cold Wars 2016 Part 2

So now the second part of my Cold Wars coverage! As previously discussed the main event for day 2 was the Saga tournament. I went with my Era of the Princes Rus army as previously discussed, with warlord, 16 warriors (units 12 and 4) 8 special hearthguard, and 12 levy archers. That gave me 6 saga dice but half my army is in the hearth guard so there is a bit of an all your eggs in one basket type thing.

Game 1: Sacred Ground Modified vs Britons 

The modification to the normal scenario is the same that used in the larger tournaments, rules can be found in the adepticon document (http://www.adepticon.org/wpfiles/2016/SagaGMSingles2016.pdf), but basically the amount of points you can score per turn is limited to the turn number. So 1 point turn 1 2 turn 2 ect.. This prevents one person from getting ahead to much to early. But it also makes it very difficult to recover even a single point. Finally it makes the scenario more about killing people and less about standing in certain places so some may find that bad or good. I played this with a guy I meet in the tournament every year and is usually one of the toughest opponets so I didn't start super confident.

Here we are after turn 1 of the battle for the hills. I got my hearthguard up into some terrain early to make sure and get that 1 point, the Britons stayed more in closed ranks. My plan was to put my big unit of warriors on the hill and let them stand there and use the mounted troops to chase down and kill the Britons who have a tendency to run all over.

The Britons made some good harassing attacks with javelins, and then I killed most of a unit of hearthguard. But lost allot of my good troops in the process. We are both getting max points every turn now without any issue. The foot troops are the Flemish mercenaries who get a bunch of bonuses if you attack them, but I figure I can eventually make them attack by having more points.

So things keep going that way, the Britons counter attack and kill most of my mounted troops, but one survived thankfully, so I can keep getting the Saga dice, and everyone in my army gets a fatigue if he dies. Both sides are starting to hurt of troops now, but I have a good advantage in Saga dice.

I moved my mounted guy towards the far terrain so he could get safe and scoring, and moved up my bows to harass the rest of the Briton mounted. Meanwhile the Flemish and Rus eyed each other accross the rocky hill.

Finally I decided to throw in my last mounted guy and try and rob the Britons of another dice, but I bounced and then they killed him. However the Flemish didn't achieve much either when they went in and so I was able to end the game a few points ahead. Both sides scoed lots of kills which is the tie breaker for the tournament. So that went pretty well.

Game 2: Clash of Warlords vs Crusaders

Game 2 was clash of warlords, so kill the enemy leader with no modifications. We even had to use the normal rules for choosing terrain. I was a bit lazy about that so I jsut choose the small hill from last time! The crusaders also had some Flemish along with knights both foot and mounted and some crossbows.

Here we are all set up for action, my 4 warriors in the back as usual to be safe and give me an extra die.

My plan this time is to chip away at the crusaders until a chance to kill the warlord arrives, I really want to keep my mounted troops alive as they are my main strike force, don't want to end up in the same situation as with Serge. So I am moving up the rest and chipping away at the crossbow unit with my bow shots from my mounted guys.

This goes on for a couple of turns and then the mounted troops move over to the left flank and crush my levy, and try to kill my unit of warriors with a charge including their warlord. But some how 2 are left alive and the crusader warlord ends up out of position away from his troops. I figure that there is no was for 2 warriors to kill a warlord but I toss them in anyway with as many bonuses as I can muster and get super lucky for the win! All 4 of my attacks hit and the crusaders only saved 2.

Game 3: Horde of Treasure vs Franks

This scenario is a custom one that is used at Cold Wars, basically there are 3 pieces of loot in the middle of the tables that you need to get off. You get points for holding them or escaping the table. This game was against the winner of the big Saga tournament at Adepticon so I figured it would be tough.

The 3 coins are the treasure

The Franks had a priest as their leader to add in Saga dice and took a tower for him to hang out in with a bard and 2 groups of warriors. This left 2 units of warriors and 2 units of mounted hearth guard to fight the battle.

Cool

The Franks got to go first due to better bible knowledge and moved up and set up all kinds of tricky Frankish plans. There board has allot of reaction type abilities which are interesting.

I moved up and tried to get my whole army in striking range of the treasure, and used parthian shot to get a few shots in on the Saxon warriors on the left, they are a bit like viking berserkers. But not to much effect due to Frankish defensive abilities.

The Franks moved around some mounted troops to strike into my levies and go for my small warrior unit. Then I attacked the Saxon unit and pushed them off the treasure and killed most of them.

The Saxons pulled back with the rest of the treasure and used sacrificial attacks to put fatigues on my mounted troops and pin them down preventing them from pursuing. I tried my best to get the foot unit to drop the treasure, there is a Rus ability that makes them fall back as if from a melee if I can kill someone. But between a few key mistakes and Frankish defensive abilities I wasn't able to pull it off.

A spoiling attack on my levy to get some kills and put fatigue on them sealed my chances at winning the scenario, so I decided to kill as much stuff as possible and preferably the Priest to hopefully get second place in the tournament. I was assuming allot of guys would have 2 wins.

This went alright I killed what I could including the bard, but the priest stubbornly refused to die! So a loss in my last game but lots of kill points.

In the end the chap I played here was kind of the tournament organizer so he decided I was the best other Saga player, and I had beat one of the other contenders round one and had a bunch of points so I was the winner and got first choice of prizes. I went for the Saxon plastic army set which was pretty cool. Really had a great time with this tournament as usual looking forward to it again. Might ahve to give Saxons a shot next year, but I will try out a different army for sure. Irish are really high up on my list as well, or maybe Byzantines?

Leipzig:

The last game I played was a Napoleonic battle again with the Hawks, I was just walking around taking pictures of cool stuff. But the organizer asked me if I want to play Leipzig, and I thought well I don't not want to play Leipzig. The rule set was Shako which apparently allot of guys in our club don't like for whatever reason but I found it fun.

I took over for a guy who had to leave for another game, they had already been playing for 3 hours. As commander of the French right flank I had to defend the town, with a polish division, play with the Russian cav with my cav division, and bring up another infantry division to support the town. I thought to swing out into a long line off the town and flank the advancing troops.

Which I did and started some cannon fire. A few charges with the cav were done to see  how it worked but the Russian commander wasn't much interested in battle. Around this time Nick dropped by to see how I was doing and fell for the same trap and ended up as the Russian commander.

Nick was absolutely interested in a cavalry battle it turned out, so they all charged crushed my guys and broke that division in short order. Meanwhile attacks on the town proved ineffective, and my one annoying cav unit delayed his other divisions assault across the river. Eventually I just charged and killed one unit before falling back to safety.

Things were looking bad but attacking the town was ineffective, and the big infantry division had orders to assault across the river, so that left my without a ton of trouble. But the Russian cav was coming for me.

At the end a Russian infantry battalion was broken so we were one for one, and my town was safe. The organizer declared it to be a win for the French, I guess we did well accross the River as well. But it felt like a tie to me. Anyway I found it good to try out some different Napelonic rules and have a bit of a laugh, always fun to play Nick.

Random Cool stuff:

As before here are some shot of random cool set ups:

Big Frostgrave table, I must steal their ideas!

Nice Town

Really cool Mad Max Fury road game the other guys were playing, this guy had some really nice trucks and such. I know I took more then one picture here, but my phone disagrees...

Anyway that was the con for me, hope you guys liked the coverage!

Thanks;
Mike