Saga Tournament Report: December 12, 2015

 I drove down to Salem - Haven Gaming again - this weekend for a Saga tournament. The weather's been lousy, but luckily the drive was the worst part of the experience. Haven's got a nice gaming space, and the TOs even arrange catering with some pretty good pizza. Saga's a nice change of pace from Warmachine, and I couldn't help making some comparisons throughout this report, since I was Haven last Saturday for a Warmachine tournament. Also, I won.

I brought Crusaders, a mix of Gripping Beast and Old Glory figures:

Warlord
Hearthguard 4 pts
Warriors 2 pts
Levy 1 pt

Each game is only six points, but you bring seven points worth to the tournament and then decide what's going down on the table - and how they're equipped and organized - at deployment. For example, my Hearthguard could go down as four separate units of 4 models each, or as two units of 8, or a unit of 12 and a unit of 4 (max unit size is 12, so no 16-model units); further, they could be mounted or foot, and if foot, equipped with two-handed weapons instead of shields. This gives your list selection a lot more flexibility than Warmachine grants, even if you're using Specialists. It's a nice layer of strategy - you can organize into smaller, more fragile units to ensure a game-long supply of Saga dice, or clump up into bigger, more powerful units at the cost of fewer Saga dice.

Round One

For the first round, I faced off against Randy's Crusaders in Clash of the Warlords - the way to win this one is to kill your opponent's Warlord (rather like Warmachine). (Also, there were a surprising number of Crusaders at the tournament.) His force, built off of his old GW Bretonnian models, was surprisingly ranged heavy: he brought three units of bow-armed Warriors, one unit of crossbows, and two 4-man units of Knights. Usually I shy away from ranged in Saga, unless the faction battle board supports it, but I guess if you go all in it works out. In this game, I wasn't able to get enough models into melee to shut his archers down, and they slowly whittled away at my forces while his knights tied up my own on the right side of the board. I finally went for a hail Mary, and charged my Warlord across a cabbage field to attack his in single combat... and rolled one hit on ten dice. His Warlord was a bit more effective, and brought mine down with hits to spare. So, I lost, but I did get a goodly number of victory points from killing his models. More on that topic later.

Round Two

Second round was against the feared Steppe Nomads - Mongols, basically - run by Mario. This army is one of the special snowflakes in Saga. They're probably the best ranged army, and since they're all mounted, they're very mobile - they even have a trick where they can redeploy a unit on their opponent's side of the table. But they're quite fragile in melee, and any scenario where they have to hold ground is already a problem. This was one such scenario, Sacred Ground, where you score points by having models on one of the zones in the middle of the board. On the other hand, this table had no cover or rough terrain whatsoever, which did rather favor their style of play. It had me on the back foot before deployment.

Steppe Nomads making a final stand against the filthy Crusaders

However, I kicked things off by sending my eight mounted Knights across the table and murdering the Warriors on his left flank - thanks to Taking the Cross, one of the Crusader board abilities, I can push them 32" across the table with two activations, and hit a weak unit with only a single fatigue. In this game, I ended up trading them for six warriors... but also forced Mario to draw his Warlord and half his Hearthguard over to deal with it while my other units moved up toward the hills in the middle. Over the course of the game, he was able to kill off my Knights and my Warlord early, but in the end I was able to kill all of the Nomads, giving me a complete victory. (One turning point would be when his warlord attacked the single surviving Knight and barely failed to kill him, saving me a crucial Saga die.)

Round Three

Crusader knights advance on the river crossings against the Saracens

The final round was against Ollie's Saracens in Battle at the Ford - win by having more points across the river than your opponent does. Above you can see the results of my first turn. Instead of slinging my mounted Knights across the river, I decided to play a bit more defensively. Ollie peppered my mounted Knights with arrows, to no effect, and then threw his right-hand unit of mounted Ghulams into my foot Knights - with terrible results. He lost all but two of his own in exchange for two of mine, and the following turn my foot Knights finished off the unit. After that combat, Ollie was on the back foot and - though I once again lost my Warlord and mounted Knights - I was able to push across the river and kill all of his models.

Final result: With two complete victories and one not-too-terrible loss, I scored enough points to win the tourney.

Tournament Scoring

Which is another difference between Saga and Warmachine. Warmachine tournaments run according to the Steamroller packet are done Swiss style, where winners play winners and losers play losers. The winner of an event will have lost none of their games. There are tiebreakers - number of control points scored, enemy points killed, and so on - but winning each individual game is critical. The downside to this is that the number of rounds is based on the number of players, which can make for long tourneys. More than 8 players usually requires 4+ rounds.

In both of the Saga tournaments I've played in, though, the winners are decided by how much they score in each game, and the score is based on how many enemy models you kill, plus 5 points if you actually win the game. An army is worth - including the Warlord - 27 points. So winning a game, if you table your opponent, is only about 16% of your score: 27 slaughter points + 5 scenario points = 32 points. End result: players have an incentive to focus more on killing models and/or preserving their own than on winning by scenario. On the other hand, tournament organizers can limit the number of rounds and still get a result.

Now, this might be what the designers had in mind, but it seems a bit askew to me that a player can lose a game - or even all their games - and still win the tournament. The worst case for this is probably Clash of the Warlords: Able could damn near table Baker but lose only his warlord, to Baker's sole surviving Hearthguard, and the scores would be Able: 26 points, Baker: 8 points. Even though Baker's won the game, he's dramatically behind Able in tournament standings. Spencer and I talked about it on the way home, and the most elegant fix (aside from adopting a Swiss system, which has its own problems) seems to be to raise the reward for winning scenario to 15 points. Then Able would be at 26 - still, and Baker would be at 18. Still behind Able, but not nearly so badly - and in less ridiculous games, the winner would probably have enough of a points lead so that the winner of the tourney would also have won all their games.

And yes, I know about Pyrrhic victories and winning the battles but losing the war. This is a game of toy soldiers, a tournament is not - usually - a campaign, and the drive home isn't Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. I hope.