I think Saga is a clever game design that creates plenty of decision points and opportunities for creative thinking. My problem in terms of a wargame is that the player spends too much time focusing on the dice and the battle board. That’s fine from a ‘game’ perspective but I’m not sure it’s relevance to the ‘war’ perspective. It’s not like it’s really about command and control, more about assigning extra powers to units, but why that should happen in the context of what’s happening on the table is not clear to me.
Saga is a rewarding game experience if you want the challenge of outsmarting your opponent, I get that and can be a very competitive game player myself. It’s not the game I struggle with it’s the relevance to history.
Now Lion Rampant is hardly a deep historical game and it takes plenty of short cuts in the interest of playability, so I’d hardly hold it up as a glittering example of historical gaming. Despite that, the abstractions still aspire to create something a little more plausible - the problem of command and control and units not doing what you want. That I like. In its favour it avoids the big speed bump in play that the Saga dice and battle board creates and so the LR system allows play on the table to move at quite a pace, keeping both players fully engaged.
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April 20, 2024, 08:31:03 AM
