Age of Fantasy Skirmish: First Game

These rules are free!

I ask you, fellow bloggers, do I need another skirmish set of rules? The answer is...yes! If you're like me, you are looking for that one set of rules that rises above the rest, is simple to play, and provides just the right amount of challenge without taking hours to play.

So what's the next possible rules set? Enter Age of Fantasy: Skirmish. It's part of the One Page Rules family, which consists of five sets of rules for big battles and skirmish battles of both fantasy and sci-fi, all free. As you probably guessed by the name, all the core rules are printed on one three column sheet. Basic special ability rules are printed on a second page with army specific special abilities on each army sheet. There's also an AI system for playing solo/cooperatively and a campaign system. All of this for FREE!? Yep. I advise you to drop what you're doing and go check it out!...Well, after you read my play through post below.

So first we need two armies. I decided to go with the classic orcs and dwarfs match up. I will be using the AI rules.

"Rally ho!"

Dwarfs (played by me):
Engineer (1) equipped with a rifle
Marksmen (3)
Iron Warrior (1)
120 points

"Orc smash!"

Orcs (played by the AI):
Boss (1)
Orcs (3)
Orc Archers (3)
125 points


Now I set up terrain and objective markers between the two deployment zones.

Note: I cut all movement and ranged distances by a 1/3 as I have a smaller board than recommended. 

Objective markers are the skulls.

 

Before the battle

Turn One:

Orcs draw first blood with a lucky arrow!

 

End of turn one. Lots of moving and a few shots fired.

Turn 2:

Shortly before this orc was killed by a close range shot from the dwarf! The dwarf holds the objective.

The boss gets charged by the Iron Warrior and takes a wound while the objective becomes contested!

The end of turn two. Lots of action!

Turn 3:

The Iron Warrior charges again but is taken out as the boss orc rains down blows.

Another orc downed. An arrow stuns the marksman and another orc charges finishing the dwarf off!

The dwarf engineer, the last one on the field after a marksman fails his morale test, makes a desperate attack hoping to take out the boss orc but fails!

End of the game. Orcs control all three objectives. Dwarfs are defeated!

A bunch of different tokens from the designers of the game.

First Impressions: That was a lot of fun! Superior numbers won the day over quality troops.

I like how the AI decision tree works. The AI doesn't just attack the nearest player unit but you go to objectives and attack if you can. Makes me want to come up with some more scenarios. You can either let the AI tree do the work or use logic. Like if I was the orc player, the dwarf engineer would be considered a hybrid as he has two attacks in melee so would rush into melee. Since he was slow and armed with a rifle, I'd probably rule that he would advance and fire, only making melee attacks to get objectives. So there is a little wiggle room to make logical decisions.

Seemed like both orcs and dwarfs were doomed by hot dice. Nearly every wound ended in 5's or 6's, which meant a knockout. Admittedly, dwarfs probably do better in hand-to-hand combat instead of being "shooty" but I figured an engineer would have a retinue of riflemen so I went that route.