SAGA Age of Magic review

Age of Magic is the long-awaited fantasy supplement for the SAGA game system. I had to wait a bit longer for mine, as the faction dice sold out almost immediately on their release in April. I didn’t want to buy anything unless I could get everything I wanted in a single order. And I wanted everything.

What you get

The Age of Magic book provides rules for playing SAGA in a fantasy setting of your choosing of of your own creation. It’s not a re-presentation of the SAGA core rules – you’ll still need that to play Age of Magic.

Age of Magic introduces new unit and character types to fit in all the wonderful elements a fantasy setting allows. Factions can recruit the new Sorcerer character type, which adds spellcasting abilities to your army.

War machines, monsters and other creatures are also included in lists. Each of these types is sub-divided further. This allows you to really go digging through your old boxes of long-forgotten models, as almost anything can be adapted to work in Age of Magic.

The book has been really well produced, with great illustrations scattered throughout that bring the content to life.

What comes through strongly in the book is a love of fantasy settings and what you as a player/creator can do with the settings. The emphasis in this book is to let your imagination run wild and put together an army that can be truly unique, based on your own collection. The factions included in the game have nods to other games, especially classic Warhammer, but there’s a tremendous amount of freedom in and between these lists.

The archetype’s the thing

The broad quality comes across to the six factions in the book, too. Loosely divided into ‘order’ and ‘chaos’, the factions are more about the background play style of an army than the models. So you won’t find a wood elf army or a goblin army, but there’s a Lords of the Wild board and a Horde board which would fit those. I will do a deep dive into each of these archetypes in a future series.

Here’s a example though: let’s say you had an older 4th or 5th edition Warhammer Empire army. You could load up your knights, militia, handgunners and cannon and take a Great Kingdoms army. Or, you could focus on your Kislev wing and Amber wizards and take a Lords of the Wild list, or else take a Horde of flagellants. There are many possibilities and depending on your collection you could do all of the above!

Get your magic on

Age of Magic provides six decks of magic spells to use too. Each of the factions has access to two of those decks. The spells available give you a way of supplementing your Battle Board abilities. Magic spells have their own dice pool separate from your SAGA dice, giving you a bit more reach in terms of abilities.

Love letter to fantasy wargaming

I almost called this article “everything Oldhammer is new again” as it’s clear the authors loved their classic fantasy wargaming, and Age of Magic sets out to capture that feeling. In my opinion it has succeeded. If you’re an active or even a lapsed wargamer with old miniatures laying around that you’d like to use again, then I highly recommend SAGA Age of Magic.