Vikings – SAGA Abilities

Analysis and learnings’ from the Viking battle board and SAGA Abilities

Third in my series which started with the Carolingian Franks, then the Anglo Saxons and this time I have a look at the Vikings, the archetypal faction for the Age of Vikings.

Quick Overview of Faction

The Viking’s are marked as an easy faction in the Age of Vikings sourcebook.

They have very limited warband options. I will start by looking at the basic list –

The second special unit available is the Varangians, these are a heavy weapons armed Hearth Guard. They can only be used is you have taken Harald Hardrada as your warlord.

They also have the choice of 2 Legendary Units – Harald Hadrada and Ragnar Lothbrok

This is quite a dry list with very little equipment options, and a good one for a new player to use, now lets have a look at their Saga Abilities –

SAGA Abilities

Let’s look at the Viking battle board.

Basic SAGA Abilities

The Vikings follow the majority of battle boards in the Age of Vikings with 3 basic abilities which activate units based on unit type e.g. hero, hearth guard, Warriors or levies.

Thus we have these 3 basic activation abilities

• HIRDMEN – Activate a hero, or a unit of hearth guards
• BONDI – Activate a unit of warriors
• THRALLS – Activate a unit of levies

COMBAT BONUS

This operates for the Vikings as it does for virtually all Factions in the Age of Vikings. That is you place SAGA dice into the ability and spend them to up your attack or defence dice during Melee, Shooting or Shooting/Reaction on a 1 for 1 basis, or a 2 for 1 basis for the relevant rare symbol.

ACTIVATION POOL

This is a common ability, for 1 of the rare saga dice symbols you can take 2 of your available SAGA Dice, roll them and add them to your inactive Saga dice pool – see my post on SAGA Dice for more information on the different states of SAGA dice. Because this is a basic ability that is triggered in the orders phase, so long as you have enough available SAGA dice and remember when you trigger an ability the SAGA dice used to trigger it becomes available, so you really only need a minimum of 1 SAGA dice in your available pool prior to triggering to use- and you keep rolling the rare symbol, a 1 in 6 chance you can trigger ,the ACTIVATION POOL multiple times.

Advanced SAGA Abilities

As with all the Age of Vikings battle boards there are 10 Advanced SAGA Abilities.

• 6 are triggerable during a Melee activation,
• 1 is triggerable during the Orders Phase,
• 1 is triggerable as a Shooting/Reaction,
• 1 is triggerable during the Activation Phase
• 1 is triggerable during the Activation/Reaction Phase
• 0 are triggerable as an Order/Reaction.
• 0 are triggerable during a Shooting activation,

Straight away we see the emphasis for the Vikings is Melee, Melee oh and the Melee Phase. Shall we start with the Melee Phase related abilities

FRIGG – Norse god of Fertility – a nice two option Advanced ability, either remove a fatigue from your unit or gain 3 attack dice. For a single SAGA dice an extra 3 attack dice is a powerful option.

HEIMDALL – The Watchmen of the gods – For a single SAGA Dice and the sacrifice of 1 Armour you gain 5 attack dice.

THOR – Norse god of Thunder – I really love this ability as it generates an extra automatic hit for each 6 rolled on your attack dice. For more information on automatic hits check out SAGA Rules V2 P50 column 1 paragraph 13, but in summary these hits can still be defended against.

ULLR – Norse god of hunting – a reasonably expensive ability to activate SAGA Dice wise, but it does allow you to re-roll all your attack dice which do not score a hit. If you read my analysis of Carolingians you will remember they had a similar ability, but it was not applicable to all attack dice. Also when using this rule remember the standard SAGA rules of no rerolling rerolls.

LOKI – Joker of the Norse gods – This is a lovely fun ability, triggerable using the common symbol, activating it means each time your opponent uses a SAGA ability or one of your fatigue you gain 2 attack dice. That’s quite an incentive to stop your opponent triggering abilities.

VALHALLA – the Norse house of the dead – this is quite a risky ability, you can sacrifice 1 to 3 warrior or hearth guard figures from the unit in melee, to gain 3 attack dice per figure sacrificed, you get 4 attack dice if you use the rare symbol. Now this is most cost effective when used with a warrior unit, you do need to be aware of the max attack dice limit as it may be possible that you push this too far. What makes this really powerful is that you still get the attack dice they generate as these are calculated before you activate the SAGA abilities, so you could use this to generate maximum attack dice and actually sacrifice all your attacking figures prior to rolling the combat dice.

The vikings only have 1 Advanced Abilities triggerable during the Orders Phase

RAGNAROK – the Norse end of the world– actually this ability is well named, it truly is a Nuclear option – all units melee armour is reduced by 1 – that is yours and your opponents. All your charges are free activations and VALHALLA becomes a basic saga ability – i.e. it can be activated multiple times.

Now lets look at the Advanced Abilities triggerable during activation – there is only 1

NJORD – the Norse god of Wind– this may not sound very powerful, but actually it is, it removes a fatigue from each unit within M of the warlord. This is like a bulk load of rest activations, which also still enable the effected units to activate, but with one less fatigue.

Now the 1 Advanced Abilities triggerable during activation/reaction.

ASGARD – the Norse abode of the gods– this is an interesting ability, when it is triggered you can remove a fatigue from any one of your units. It doesn’t have to be the unit targeted by the triggering charge

Next we have the 1 triggered during the SHOOTING/REACTION

ODIN – Norse god of war– for 2 SAGA dice to activate, this is quite an effective anti shooting ability. It forces the shooting unit to take as much fatigue as necessary for it to become exhausted, this will almost guarantee they cannot shoot the next turn. I have seen this used really effectively to nullify my Carolingian archers and allow the Vikings the room to get in close.

So we have looked at all the Basic and advanced abilities on the Vikings board and what are the learnings’ –

1. Berserkers are definite Fragile killing machines
   1. Use them along side the HEIMDALL ability and turn them into even more of a Glass hand grenade, massive hitting power with no survivability. With a bit of planning you can get 4 figures to generate 32 attack dice.
2. Vikings are Melee orientated,
   1. when playing a force with 60% of abilities tied to melee, probably best to invest in melee troops.
3. When playing the Vikings don’t be afraid to send your troops to Valhalla, several of their abilities actively reward this behaviour.
4. Use the ODIN ability against shootie Factions to reduce the attrition of your units prior to melee.
5. Before your activate RADNAROK build up some SAGA dice in your ACTIVATION POOL to maximise its impact. The rules only allow you to only add 1 SAGA activation to an advanced ability. So by building up your ACTIVATION POOL, once you trigger RADNAROK and VALHALLA becomes a BASIC ABILITY you will be able to use your ACTIVATION POOL to generate the SAGA dice to enable multiple VALHALLA activations. – Thanks to the SAGA Facebook community especially Casper Raundorf – for their feedback in helping to correct this post and others in the series – https://www.facebook.com/groups/1512883212323934/permalink/3047053355573571/

So this list is ideal for impulsive players. The Vikings were raiders and aggressive attackers, and this board is definitely designed to support and enable this play style.

Hope this was interesting/useful, I intend to do some more from the other boards which I have used so far, and may even do a bit on those I have not played but applying a similar analysis.