Anglo Dane – SAGA Abilities

Analysis and learnings’ from the Anglo-Dane battle board and SAGA Abilities

Fourth in my series which started with the Carolingian Franks, then the Anglo Saxons and this time I have a look at the Anglo Danes.

Quick Overview of Faction

The Anglo-Dane’s are a combination of the Viking’s and the Anglo-Saxons, according to the Age of Vikings sourcebook. Like the Vikings they have limited warband options. So what’s available –

They also have the choice of 2 Legendary Units – Harald Godwinson and Cnut the Great.

If you chose Harold you also get Gyrth and Leofwine his brothers, which along with Harold form a heroic unit. More information in Age of Vikings P26. So we are looking at an infantry heavy, melee heavy list with increased hitting power thanks to their Heavy Weapons.

SAGA Abilities

So what’s on the Anglo-Dane board.

Basic SAGA Abilities

The Anglo-Dane like 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.

These 3 basic activation abilities are –

• HUSCARLS – Activate a hero, or a unit of hearth guards
• FYRD – Activate a unit of warriors
• GREAT FYRD – Activate a unit of levies

COMBAT BONUS

This operates for the Anglo-Danes as it did for the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. 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 an trigger the ACTIVATION POOL multiple times.

Advanced SAGA Abilities

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

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

Unsurprisingly for a Faction representing the combination of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, the advanced options are Melee heavy and shooting light. So lets start with the abilities activated during melee.

SHIELDWALL – not only triggerable during melee but also as a Shooting/reaction. For 2 common SAGA Dice you get to increase your units Armour by 1. So this really only has a value if the Shooter or melee opponent doesn’t have any fatigue, otherwise you could just use the opponents Fatigue to achieve the same result. For more on Fatigue (SAGA Rules V2 P32).

UNFORGIVING – forces a fatigue on the enemy unit. But also stops you from using enemy fatigue during this melee.

CRUSH THE WEAK – for a common SAGA dice so long as the enemy has an Armour of 3 or less, you can gain 4 attack or 4 defence dice.

LIKE ROCKS – another one that can also be triggered as a Shooting/Reaction, for the cost of 2 SAGA Dice – triggering this allows you to re-roll any defence dice you wish.

DETERMINATION – A pretty cheap ability which rewards you with you choice of a mix of attack and defence dice adding up to 3. You also get an extra die of your choice for each fatigue on the enemy unit.

I am starting to see a theme, 2 out of these 5 are involving fatigue. One adds extra fatigue and the second uses the oppositions fatigue against them to generate additional attack/defence dice. Lets see if this continues as we look at those activated during the Order phase.

NOBLE LINEAGE – this is quite a nice one – it lets you either re-roll as many of your inactive SAGA dice as you want or change the face of one of your inactive dice to show a symbol of your choice. If you activate this using the Rare symbol you get to do both :-).. got to say that’s nice. But my fatigue theory falls flat.

EXHAUSTION – quite an expensive ability costing 2 rare symbols, which enables you to allocate a single fatigue on 3 units. Interestingly it doesn’t insist that these units need to be opposition units, although why you’d use it to add fatigue to your own unit I cannot currently think of a good reason. But we do see another fatigue based ability crop up. UPDATE – from 2019 Age Of Viking FAQ

ANGLO-DANISH: EXHAUSTION

Note that for this ability to take effect, you must designate 3 units, but they may also be yours. An exhausted unit so designated would ignore the fatigue thus suffered

2019 Age Of Viking FAQ

Lets see the abilities triggerable during the Orders/Reaction phase.

INTIMIDATION – ooo another fatigue based ability. This causes the first unit activated during the next activation phase to suffer a fatigue at the start of it’s activation, if you activate this with the rare symbol, it effects the first 2 units. – HOLD ON- there is a correction for this ability in the SAGA Age of Vikings 2019 FAQ’s – lets see what is says – Ok the correction is instead of taking the Fatigue at the START of it’s activation it takes it at the end of its activation, so basically this stops the unit becoming exhausted until the activation is complete.

That leaves the 2 Advanced Abilities triggerable during activation.

SHOCK – activate a unit to charge – the target unit cannot close ranks. Remember not to waste this one on any units unable to Close Ranks – so that’s cavalry, missile armed or Heavy Weapon armed units.

LORD OF WAR – and we end with yet another fatigue based ability. It removes all fatigue from you warlord, ups his armour to 6 until the start of your next turn, but stops you activating your Warlord again this turn. So the ideal use for this is after you have potentially triple activated your warlord so he hits exhaustion, activate this remove all his fatigue and then up his armour to protect him. I suppose it would also be good if you have just used resilience 3 times to absorb casualties.

So what have we learned about the Anglo-Danes?

1. When playing the Anglo-Danes – learn how to use Fatigue to your benefit.
2. Consider using INTIMIDATION to delay your opponents big push – by either causing a unit to become exhausted or forcing the opponent to rest units before they can attack. —
   1. oops — Corrected due to 2019 FAQ – INTIMIDATION awards the fatigue at the end of the opponents activation, thus instead of enabling you to use it to CANCEL a triggered activation or shorten a charge range prior to contact on units with no fatigue at the start of the turn,
   2. It limits the ability of your opponent to chain activations and potentially causes them to review the order in which they activate their units in order to minimise the impact of INTIMIDATION.
   3. Also remember that for 1 Fatigue you can force the unit to only move/charge S. If you can get it to generate 2 fatigue you can force the units activation to be cancelled and not proceed.
3. If you don’t get the dice you need to activate the ability you want – don’t forget NOBLE LINEAGE enables you to reroll your inactive saga dice or just alter one of them to give you what you need.
4. You potentially will need to use fatigue to reduce the enemies armour to 3 to enable CRUSH THE WEAK to work. Consider combining it with EXHAUSTION and DETERMINATION to max out your benefit.
   1. Start with EXHAUSTION in the orders phase, initiate melee, trigger DETERMINATION, use the fatigue from EXHAUSTION to drop the targets armour, then trigger CRUSH THE WEAK.
5. Keep UNFORGIVING as a final step in a Melee to hopefully force exhaustion on the enemy, or use it to reduce the number of resilience a warlord will be able to use.
   1. Forcing exhaustion at this stage won’t impact the current melee but will weaken the unit if you have multiple charges lined up against it.
   2. Don’t forget LORD OF WAR, use this to stop your warlord from being taken out during the Opponents turn. By removing all his fatigue and upping his armour to 6, you will maximise the number of times resilience can be used and at the same time reduces the chance of the opposition generating hits.

So this faction despite representing the combination of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, the battle board is not related to either of the other battle boards. This board requires planning and a good understanding of using fatigue.

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.