Thoughts on Age of Sigmar

The impending release of Games Workshop's new game, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has been impossible to ignore.  Once they provided the rules and Warscrolls for free download I was pretty amped to try out the new rules. 

So we got together last night and played Empire vs High Elves.

Before we started we briefly went over a few of the basic rules so that we were in agreement on how we interpreted a few things, then decided to basically play the rules “as-is” as much possible.  We did, however, want to compare how the new rules would workout with equal sized armies, so we used the old point values to attempt to keep things “slightly” balanced.  We also added a few extra High Elf models before we started to get the total model counts within the 1/3 threshold.  I had 98 models and Rookie War Gamer had just under 70 (I forget the exact number). We didn’t want to deal with the Sudden Death rules in our first game (if you’re outnumbered by your opponent by more than 1/3 total model count, you can pick a Sudden Death victory condition).  The basic rules state the victory conditions are to completely kill all of your opponent’s models. All of them. If you do that, it's a Major Victory.  If that’s not possible (for whatever reason) then you calculate the percentage of models lost – the player that lost the highest percentage of models from their original model count is the loser and the other player wins a Minor Victory.  Otherwise, there's no set game length. It’s a little strange, but I think they intend to expand on that with supplements, campaign packs, scenarios, etc.   I was also wondering how long the game would take if the objective is to kill all of your opponents models. Then we started playing – let me tell you, stuff dies quickly and in large quantities. Once you learn the rules and start memorizing your troops stats, this game can definitely be played fast (relatively speaking).

Set-up:

Both players roll a die, the winner decides how to divide the table up into equal halves. Rookie War Gamer won and decided to go diagonally from corner-to-corner. Then you alternate placing units no closer than 12 inches to the enemy’s deployment zone.  Nice little twist with the diagonal setup. 

The rules also state that you roll for each piece of scenery to determine its special effects. We thought it would be too many things to keep track of so we decided to roll a D3 for each piece, so on a 5 or 6 we’d roll on the scenery table. We ended up with one group trees being “Mystical” and two hills were “Arcane”. This added just the right amount of flavor, but it’s easy to forget the terrain effects during the battle.

Overall, Age of Sigmar are simple, fast, effective rules. In most cases, it was really easy to play. It’s fantastic to just lookup what you need to roll on the unit warscroll. Also, pre-measuring at any time really eliminates a lot of guessing, thinking, agonizing, and generally wasting time. It was long overdue (although apparently this was in 8th edition which i haven't played yet...) I like the roll for initiative at the beginning of each turn. Winner gets to choose who goes first. There are definitely times where deciding to make your opponent move gives an advantage. I like this.

I'm going to highlight some of what we encountered in each of the new "phase" in a battle round.

Hero Phase: Really great idea. It’s the first phase of your turn, and here’s where any of your heroes get to influence the battle. General can use a command ability, wizards can cast a spell. The magic casting is really simple too. And I love that you can only attempt to dispel (or “unbind”, as it’s now called) with a wizard within range of the caster. Pretty neat.

Movement Phase: just move. If you decide to “run”, you add D6 inches. If you run, it means you can’t shoot or charge that turn.

Shooting Phase: Also much improved. After two months of me bitching about “long range / short range modifiers”, they actually scrapped that. They reduced the ranges of most missile troops, but it’s all one effective range. You’re either in range or out, and you just roll to hit. Archers specifically, they’ve jacked up their effectiveness. High Elves have some special rules where once-per-game they can unleash a “Storm of Arrows”, each fig gets two shots! Empire archers get bonuses for "Ordered Volleys, re-rolling 1s to hit. They also get bonuses for bigger units, like units of 20 or more you get to re-roll 1s and 2s to hit. Suddenly archers are a very, very viable unit.

They changed up cannons a decent amount, which allowed me to wipe out some elf Reavers in one round of shooting:

dead Reavers

Charge Phase: now we start to get a little…wonky. It’s simple: pick a unit, if they’re within 12 inches, they can try to charge. Roll 2D6, that’s their charge distance. However, here’s where the “skirmish based” rules start to show up. You move each model up to the charge distance. Since you’re trying to get into combat, you want them as close as possible.

We immediately realized you’ve gotta take the figs off the movement trays for this to be effective. Fine for smaller units, but like you see in the picture above it starts to bog down a bit moving 30+ figs. This (and combat) is very much like the current 40K rules. It doesn’t really work for ranked up units. It’s meant for smaller blobs of figs.

Combat Phase: The combat mechanism on its face is great. Roll to hit, roll to wound, opponent tries to save, then determine total damage/and allocate wounds.

But combat starts with the “Pile In”. You pick a unit that either charged or is already within 3 inches of an enemy. Then you Pile In. Each fig moves up to 3 inches to get closer to the enemy. So now there’s more movement and trying to jam as many figs as possible into a mess of combat. 

what a mess

Again, a little cumbersome for traditional ranked-up units of 20+ models. You finish your attacks for that unit, and then it’s your OPPONENTS TURN to pick a unit and attack. So, based on our reading of the rules, it doesn’t matter who charged, or whatever, it matters what unit you pick to fight first, then your opponent picks a unit and attacks, and you keep alternating. I’m not sure if I like this yet. Example, on the same turn I charged my Pistoliers (who are suddenly awesome) into his Mage and charged my remaining Knights into that big combat from the picture. I chose to attack with the Pistoliers first, they killed his mage.

dead Mage

Then Rookie War Gamer got to choose a unit, and attacked my knights, who died before they could even attack on their charge. Seems…wrong. Now, we didn’t realize at the beginning that’s what you’re supposed to do, so it’s possible after playing a few more games and understanding how that works that it could add a whole new level of fun. But to me it’s a quirk of the rules that you have to deal with, and you’ll end up making decisions in order to take advantage of (or protect yourself from) the combat mechanic of the game, instead of more abstract tactical decisions. So, the jury is out for me on that.

Bravery Phase: This is really different but super cool. You have to keep a running total of models removed from a unit each turn, (shooting, magic, and combat), and then the last phase of a turn is Battleshock Phase, and all units that suffered casualties (you and your opponent) take a Battleshock test. Roll a D6, add the number of casualties removed, and if that total is greater than your bravery score, you lose that many models as they “flee the battle”. Example, I’ve lose two casualties (one from shooting, and one in combat). Baseline Bravery stat of 5. I get +1 for unit of at least 10 (advantage for large units). Now my bravery is a 6. I roll a 5, +2 for the casualties, my roll is now a 7. That’s 1 greater than my bravery. I lose one model. Yikes! It can get bloody really fast. I love this mechanism though. It played out awesome in the game. It's different than any of the other wargames that i've played (whether fictional or historical).

After about 2.5 hours and 3 turns, we called the game. Since nobody got tabled, we tallied up the casualties and the Empire squeaked out a minor victory.

On the whole, I really enjoyed playing Age of Sigmar. There’s a few other hiccups with heroes/characters and how they apparently attack with ALL the melee weapons they're armed with, and some other minor things. But I have concerns about the combat phase (the order of units attacking seems wrong) and the pile in/charge moving is really cumbersome for big units. I’m hoping that maybe we just missed something and played it wrong, but the rules are so short and simple that I’m pretty sure we played it correct.

I still think they could have introduced all of these changes, even the renaming of races to "protect the IP", but do this all without gutting and throwing out the existing background setting. To me, that was the best part.