Song of Blades and Heroes is a fast play fantasy rule set from Ganesha Games. When I bought my copy, they were $8 to download as a PDF document from the Ganesha web site. You can order your own copy by clicking on the book cover to the left. If you live in the UK like I do, having a Pay Pal account is really useful and the cost converted to £5.31, which I think is pretty good value for what you get. Initially, I only printed the first 16 out of 35 pages in the book, as that is the number of pages occupied by the core rules. Although the rules are marketed as ‘fantasy’ rules, we use them with ancient and dark age historical figures. You simply ignore the bits about magic and stuff. Having said that, it would be interesting to see what happens if our Vikings are confronted by a Grendel or a Troll one day.
We may even see how the rules play using our collection of Lord of the Rings figures. As is the norm these days, there is a very active Yahoo Group for Ganesha Games’ rules, where you can get loads of help if you need it and download some useful tools, such as a war band points calculator! You can join the Yahoo Group by following the link below.
So, why did we decide to use a fantasy rule set for our historical skirmish gaming? Well, there are several reasons really. Firstly, the game can be played on a very small playing surface; if you’ve got a space a couple of feet square, then you’ve got enough room to fight a battle. Secondly, you only need a dozen or so figures per side to play the game, which means you can paint up lots of small skirmish forces from different ancient armies. This makes the game cheap and means that you don’t lose interest (as I do very easily!) during the painting stage of building your armies. To begin with, we are going to try Saxons against Vikings and Romans against British Celts. You only need three 6-sided dice to play the game; this is not such an advantage in my case, as I love rolling lots of weird dice. Other factors which appeal to me are the way the activation system works; you can roll up to three dice for each figure, with each dice being compared to the figure’s ‘Quality’ factor. If the figure passes the die roll it gets an action, which can be moving, shooting, fighting etc so, it can potentially make three actions per move. However, if it fails two or more of the dice rolls, then the turn is over for that side and play passes to another player. You can either proceed cautiously (making 1 roll per figure) and make sure all your figures get activated, or you can play a riskier, more aggressive game, potentially doing more damage, but also risking not activating a number of your figures. I like that! All movement and shooting ranges are measured in short, medium and long measuring sticks, rather than using tapes or rulers. The sticks have to be made, but it is a simple task and greatly simplifies the measuring done in the game. All in all, the rules are very simple to learn and you can have a really exciting game in well under an hour, which means you can use the campaign rules, which are included in the book, to string a set of linked games together in an evening’s play. The rules are fast, fun, innovative and definitely worth a fiver of anybody’s hard earned cash. As our forces get painted up, we will post reports on our games and don’t forget to have a look at the Ganesha web site and the Yahoo Group for more information.
