A Viking reviews SAGA Aetius & Arthur

Stephen Holdeman III (aka Stephen the Viking) recently reviewed the new SAGA supplement Aetius & Arthur for our local SAGA Facebook group.  We've discussed collaborating on this blog so here is our first guest post.  Take it away, Stephen! 

To sum it up, it's an amazing supplement! Without a doubt, this is the most impressed I've been with an expansion. Our group loves how well things were done and the fantastically balanced boards! We've had a blast playing the 6 new warbands against all comers in our Kansas City group. In my opinion, the original charm of Saga is back in full force with A&A. Wonderfully useful mercenary units, unique board concepts, and of course access to models we've all been waiting to bring into the "Sagaverse."

There are probably more typos and grammatical mistakes in this supplement than the others but it doesn't affect readability. The new boards can be as simple or as complex as you like. The only section I wanted more of was content that "retrofits" existing armies to represent earlier versions of the same forces. This was a great idea to give life to factions without giving them entirely new boards, but unfortunately I think a lot of them are a swing-and-a-miss. Many of these offer little more than a new Special Character and don't quite offer changes to make playing the old factions exciting.

For those worried about balance or combining this with other supplements, every Saga supplement is tested against the original 4 warbands and each other! If you remove the historical aesthetic, you still have an amazingly balanced, competitive-as-you-like, fresh game that has no other comparison. The new factions fit so well into the game that it was like they intended to make them from the start. 

For those concerned with the chronological distance between factions, we already have a huge range with the first few supplements! Warbands are commonly going up against foes that are distanced by 300-400 years or from completely far off regions of the world, hidden from their own cultures until many years later. It would be a shame to separate such great boards from a system that was built to handle them! 

Stephen and his Dark Age crew

Stephen and I discuss editorial control of the blog