Song Of Blades And Heroes

I'm playing the new fantasy skirmish game 'Sword Weirdos' at the club this week. This means that I've dragged out my fantasy skirmish figures (or, at least, the ones I can find; there's a box missing somewhere, hidden in the garage untouched since we moved to this house nearly two years ago). But I have everything I need for tonight's game. However whilst I had the figures out I thought I'd like to try Song Of Blades And Heroes again. It's been a while. And I realised that I'd never taught Mrs Kobold how to play it. So last night I did.

I put together two warbands - Dwarves and Uruk Hai. They were both similar in structure but with some differences in traits to add a little variety:

Dwarves

1 x Chief - Q3 C4 - Heavy Armour
4 x Warriors - Q3 C3
2 x Armoured Warriors Q3 C3 - Heavy Armour
2 x Gunners - Q3 C2 - Shoot (M)
All of the Dwarves had Short Move and Steadfast.

Uruk Hai

1 x Leader - Q3 C4 - Savage
4 x Warriors - Q3 C3
2 x Pike-armed Warriors - Q3 C3 - Long Reach
2 x Archers - Q3 C2 - Shoot (M)
'Long Reach' was lifted from Advanced SoBaH. I find that too fiddly and complicated, but some of the traits can be ported across.

We just played a straight head to head fight, since Catherine didn't really know the mechanisms. She took the Dwarves.

Here's my Uruk Hai ready to go. I put the warriors in two groups, with two swordsmen backed up by a pike each.

The Dwarves. The heavy foot were on one flank and the ordinary warriors in the centre.

Obviously activation failures saw the formations of both sides broken up. I got an archer on Catherine right and fired a few speculative, but ineffective, arrows.

We got into a fight in teh centre, but the pike support failed to come up when I wanted it to. This allowed three Dwarves to gang up on one of my warriors ...

... and that was him dead.

Catherine brought up more of our force leaving one of my warriors, and his tardy supporting pikeman, looking very lonely. However them managed to score a kill.

Out on the other flank my other warrior group were fighting the armoured Dwarves. They killed one.

Catherine had her leader in action, but he wasn't achieving much. I brought mine up as well

He killed Catherine's chief. And it was a gruesome kill too, thanks to the Savage trait, so that saw the Dwarves take a morale test. With their Steadfast trait they'd only be failing on a '1', but it was enough to break up their formation.

And that was it for the Dwarves. They broke up and became isolated figures, which proved easy pickings for the Uruk Hai leader and some supports.

The Dwarves lost five of their nine figures. The Uruk Hai had just the single initial casualty.

I did feel that, for 3pts, the Long Reach trait was extremely useful. It allows you to 'gang up' on enemy figures from behind a friendly figure, and I made great use of that to give myself the advantage in numerous combats. That, on its own, would merit the cost, but you can also choose to attack from such a position as well, and it also negates some bonuses from other traits. All in all it's very useful. I don't think my issues with it are entirely due to it being imported from a more detailed game; it's simply a good trait.

Anyway, it was good to play SoBaH again.