evildrganymede

evildrganymede, 6 days ago to Wargaming

We finally played "1066, Tears To Many Mothers" last night and it was good! It'd work well as an introductory wargame (it's really a very interactive tableau building card game).

The artwork is amazing on the cards too, though some of the noble folks look a bit too clean & modern for the 11th century. I'm sure the artist based some of the characters on moderns actors too, Harold Godwinson looks suspiciously like Russell Crowe! :D

You start off with the appearance of Halley's Comet & progress through several objectives to get to the Battle of Hastings (strangely the Saxons took the comet as a bad omen, and the Normans took it as a good omen. Not sure how that's decided!). While you're doing that you can pick off/damage units that are being build in your opponent's tableau, move your cards around, & do other actions. The resources to buy cards are very tight in this game & it seems that it's best to get the resource generating cards out there as early as possible - otherwise you need to spend cards from your hand as resources & it's easy to run out of cards there! You're also somewhat at the mercy of the random draw to determine what is available on a turn - at the end I had some very high cost units in my hand that I had no way to pay for and put in play!

I started off pretty well as the Saxons, fending off Vikings in the north and then tromping down to the south of England to face the Normans. But I got stuck on later objectives as I didn't have a lot of cards with Zeal and so the Normans beat me to the Hastings objective and got a headstart attacking the wedges there. By the time I caught up I was already demoralised and I hadn't really arranged my units in the wedges very well - in the end the Normans took two wedges and won. I almost killed William with my archers earlier but he managed to shrug off all his wounds with a timely "heal one character" card!

It's a fun, clever, thematic game with lots of interesting decisions - worth checking out! #wargaming

about halfway through the game.
The End - the Saxons couldn't gain a big enough advantage in the Battle of Hastings and were defeated by the Normans!