Viking Village Raid

John came over this evening and we played a couple of games of 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. More to the point we played an honest to goodness scenario.

A village, in this case a Viking village populated almost exclusively by lady Viking warriors, is the home of an artefact of an unspecified but Can Be Carried By One Man kind of nature. It's in one of the four houses in the village. The village is surrounded by a rather rubbish palisade with great big gaps in it, and has a watchtower.

One warrior is on guard in the watchtower, whilst the others sleep, scattered through the four houses.

An enemy warband, in this case some skeletons, launches a dawn raid on the village, with the aim of searching the houses, recovering the artefact and escaping off their board edge with it.

And that was it. we played it twice, swapping sides after the first game.

In the first game I played the skeletons. They weren't very good at sticking together - a lone skeleton approached the village, and immediately alerted the guard. The fact that the village was built from interlocking plastic bricks tells you that these were Danish Vikings:

The rest rushed towards the village, with varying degrees of enthusiasm:

But the Vikings were up and alert, and were organising a defensive line:

Some skeletons tried a flanking move through one of the other gaps in the palisade, but the beserker saw them off:

The skeleton numbers were dropping rapidly:

And the last few were now just fighting for the show of it:

The game ended in an easy victory for the Vikings.

John now took the skeletons. He split them into two groups. Here's one of them, approaching the village in a more orderly fashion:

They were at the gates before the guard spotted them. She was a real hero; not only did she raise the alarm, but she then used her throwing spears to dispatch three skeletons in three shots, pretty much neutralising one of the groups:

The other skeletons rushed into the village. One warrior came sleepily out of her cottage to see what the fuss was, and was cut down in an instant:

The skeletons were soon all over the village, but the Vikings were waking up and starting to fight back:

Disaster - the artefact was in the first house the skeletons searched. One of them raced away with it; it was only a matter of time before it reached the safety of its home edge:

See those two Vikings in he distance behind it? They gave chase, risking all on their activation rolls, and caught up with the fleeing skeleton, cutting it down, and saving the artefact:

This took the fight out of the remaining skeletons; they were slowly smashed to pieces, with insult being added to injury when the last skeleton was destroyed by the Viking's bard - a figure added just to make up the points:

In the first game I was unlucky with activation rolls; I had a number of good opportunities to overwhelm individual Vikings which failed when key figures failed to move into the attack. the key to the skeletons is coordinated assaults on particular figures, and with failed activation rolls I never got to administer killing blows.

In the second game the skeletons were able to gang up on some of the Vikings, but the heroic spear-thrower hampered them in one part of the village, and the equally heroic sprint by the two other warriors stopped them escaping with the prize.

On the whole the balance of this scenario probably favoured the Vikings, but we both had fun playing it. Even with the somewhat improvised terrain.