Monday, August 29, 2022

More Age of Fantasy

After assembling three 705-ish points army lists for Age of Fantasy, I set up a table and then drew two of the armies to participate. The result was a rematch of lizard warriors against medieval humans, or Saurians vs Chivalrous Kingdoms, in the parlance of the rules.

The armies would fight over a pass with four objective markers scattered about. Deployment was determined by die roll.

Activation in Age of Fantasy is by unit, and alternates between the sides. To make this more challenging as a solo venture, I assigned each unit to a card and each side had it's own deck. On that side's turn, they drew a card to determine which unit would activate. Thus sometimes, the order of units was not ideal, or rather did not meet my plans, and thus forced some changes to my thinking, which was the point after all.

Games are limited to four turns, which doesn't sound like much, but given movement rates and devastating combat effects, it seems to be more than adequate to determine a winner.

By way of example, the human archers were quickly cut down by the triceratops (the onboard crew did not even attack - as you can either shoot or melee and they are shooters. So it was all dinosaur stompin' time).

In the middle, the scrum lasted a touch longer, with the marine iguanas holding out against the foot knights for two turns.

The mounted knights charged the geckos and it went about as well as could be expected for the tiny lizard warriors.

That fellow in the lower right has the right idea.

 However, they passed their morale check and the survivors hung on.

For their part, the knight's victory was short lived. The lizard shaman (using the Frog-Mage stats) has some seriously powerful spells - and wiped out the entire unit with ONE spell!

On turn three, the Chivalrous Kingdoms, who had been quite aggressive to this point, found themselves consolidated into a rather thin line.

The High Champion, who must have truly been high, decided to make a bold move.

The results were predictable. In my defense, I didn't realize he only had a Tough trait of 3. I thought it was comparable to the same trait for the Triceratops. It was not - the triceratops has a Tough of 12.

Barely inconvenienced by the stupidly brave man on a horse, the triceratops and crew turned their attention to the human archers.

This pair began to seriously reconsider their life choices.


A similar miscalculation on my part with respect to hero hit points occurred in favor of the humans, when I failed to realize the lizard shaman only had three. However I also screwed up the way close combat works when attacking a single figure. I could not find anything in the rules, so assumed it was like so many other rules sets and allowed only three attackers. 

Later this was clarified for me in a Facebook group (oddly enough, I'm one of the admin) - the rules apply exactly the same. So potentially many more of the attackers could have been involved.

You might argue that the shaman survived the attack as a result. However, they have an insanely good quality of 2, so it's very hard to cause them any damage at all. 


In any case, it wouldn't have changed anything. The Chivalrous Kingdoms were down to this one unit of knights.

Here is the overview at the end of turn 4.

The lizards controlled two objectives, the Chivalrous Kingdoms had one, and one was contested at the end of the game. The humans had lost all but one unit of foot knights, compared to the loss of but one entire unit by the lizards.

A lizard victory. Not a bad accounting for the shaman's first outing.



8 comments:

  1. Cracking stuff John, I like your card activation idea for solo games of AoF.

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    1. Thanks, Paul! AoF is a lot of fun - a simple game with enough flavor that it feels like the units are all different and fit the fantasy theme. I tend to prefer games with card draw activation, so adding that was as much a personal bias as anything!

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  2. A most excellent battle John, very exciting! That Triceratops is going to be a tough nut to crack for any opposing force!

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    1. Thanks, Brad! Indeed, the triceratops presents a bit of an issue. My Tanitians, who I stat as Dark Elves for Age of Fantasy have the best shot as I'm classifying the elephant as an Abyssal Beast (which sounds impressive but it's more a narrative device - still it has the same number of hit points as the triceratops).

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  3. The battle looks like it was a lot of fun and nice idea on activation.

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    1. Hi Peter, Age of Fantasy is a simple rule set that gets out of the way for the most part, while it conveys enough of the theme via traits/attributes to not feel generic. It's hard not to have fun when you can get absorbed in the game and don't have to worry about the rulebook!

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  4. Great report John. I don't know the rules but they look like a lot of fun.

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    1. Thank you, Maudlin Jack! The rules are entirely free and they have various sets of rules available. The fantasy sets correspond to Warhammer Fantasy while the Grimdark correspond to 40K, I believe. You can find all of their rules at https://onepagerules.com/ They are at least worth the price of admission!

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