Saga - The Vikings are coming

After watching some friends playing a cool new game at our game club, my brother and I decided to try out the new Saga wargame by Gripping Beast. Set in the Dark Ages, the core game mechanic is the Saga Dice and Battleboard. Each faction (4 in the basic rules: Vikings, Normans, Anglo-Danes and Welsh) have a Battleboard which list different orders or abilities that you can issue to your warband during the game. But the challenge is you have to roll and assign the Saga Dice to the Battleboard (by matching symbols) at the start of your turn and discard dice from the board to issue an order or ability to your warband during your turn.

We agreed on 4 point warbands to start with which means we only have to paint 25 or so figures to start playing. I'll be doing the Vikings while my brother will be doing the Anglo-Danes. We picked up a box of Gripping Beast's Viking Hirdmen and a Box of Warlord Games Germanic Tribesmen. The German box set was purchased for the bare chested torsos and extra weapons to convert into duel wielding Berserkers. With just these two box sets and some mixing and matching you can create two warbands, and have enough parts left over to expand to 6 points or the start of a third warband.