Age of Sigmar

Last night at the club I had my first game of Age of Sigmar, the newest iteration of Warhammer Fantasy. You have to be aware that I was already positively disposed towards this before I had the game. It looked to me to be exactly what I wanted from a fantasy war game. My friend Brian build two lists, one ogre and the other wood elves. Both were balanced to 55 wounds total with no monsters. I chose wood elves and off we went.

Movement is now more like 40K in that your units are essentially skirmishing which is much more historically correct and you can just move as you want without all the old wheeling nonsense. Much more preferable to what we used to have.

The magic system seems nice and basic although it did screw me over severely. Brian had a magician in his list and I didn't. I had a nice tough hero though. He only did the spell once but it basically opened up the ground and devoured an entire unit of elf warriors.We had a good laugh about it but even with a 50/50 chance of ending the spell kept going and it was frustrating. I'm not going to hold it against the game for now as it was just dumb luck one way or another.

Combat was good and simple and there still are tactical decisions to be made if you end up with a multi-unit melee. In an odd sort of way it reminded me of very early Warhammer and Rogue Trader. The only issue that I had run through my head was the multi-wound ogres compared to my little elves. It was much much harder to drop a single ogre and thus their unit effectiveness, than it was for them to smash through my units. It should balance out but something still niggled.

Brian's ogres did me in ultimately as I gave up the ghost when I was down to two archers and my hero. At least my elf lord died giving the ogres a good thrashing.

I don't like the world setting and shall just ignore it, but I found the system to be just about (maybe 80%) what I want from a fantasy game. Saying that, it isn't going to be good for the traditional Warhammer Fantasy player who wants the OTT level of complexity that Fantasy had. But for casual players and newcomers to this sort of hobby, Age of Sigmar is going to be a breath of fresh air.