Monday, February 14, 2011

Strandhogg Fantasy Playtest

Coming down with the flu means a few evenings of self-quarantine at home, so I decided to dig up the old LOTR figures I bought years ago for Dark Age skimish and finally give them a spin (I know, a normal person would use historical Dark Age figures for a Dark Age set of rules, or use fantasy figures with a fantasy set of rules...).

The rules I have settled for are the Strandhogg rules, but what I plan to use the rules with are...

Dwarves. I commissioned a whole lot of these off ebay when a painter was offering them on a massive discount. I got the rangers, the regular armoured guys, both in plastics, and a few elite warriors and command figures plus a ballista and crew in metal.

I didn't specify the colour scheme, but serendipitously the rangers come painted in three different flavours: blue sleeves, green sleeves, and brown sleeves, which makes it easy for me to tell between different warbands. I use 3 armoured dwarves as the warband leaders, and the king figure as the Noble.


Their oponents are Moria goblins, here taking an overland trip to raid a dwarven village (wait till you see the resin village buildings and 25mm farm animals I've bought for this project...). The goblins are from a few separate ebay purchases, and once again it just so happens they come in the right size for Strandhogg warbands. In this case I can distinguish the 3 warbands by their basing style, and each warband comes with one helmeted sword-and-shield figure, who will serve as the warband leaders - perfect!

I do lack a goblin king figure, so an orc stands in here.


Rather than to set the game up on my dining table, I have decided to use my coffee table for this trial game.
Let's see how it plays then...

2 comments:

Dale said...

Can't wait to hear how the rules play out. I was thinking about getting them.

captain arjun said...

Dale,

I've been wanting to play 'Viking raid' for quite a while now, so I am looking forward to the game too.

It was a choice between Strandhogg and Pig Wars, but I guess I decided against PW as I read that the combat resolution using cards instead of dice can take a lot of time.

What I like about Strandhogg from reading is the way command is done: to move a warband you simply move the leader figure to the max of his move, then place the other figures within his command span. The command span shrinks as the warband takes casualties, creating the effect that the warriors band closer together as the battle progresses.

I does suffer from a lack of expansion and support though; the author seemed to have planned on expansions covering the other nations attacked by the Vikings, but now there is no activity on the Yahoo group.