Gaming - Mortal Gods first game

Oywn and I finally played out first game of Mortal Gods last weekend. We have both gotten our faction sets, him Sparta and I Athens. We played with the hoplites I've painted up but with the faction cards. We also each had three slingers that I painted for my EIR Roman army.

The boy with his Spartan Lochos moving forwards.

We didn't build armies so much as just play with the amount that came in the starter set. It was a mirror match of Lochagos, nine heavy hoplites, three medium hoplites and three slingers. We played on a 3x3 table (six inches each side for cards).

The Athenian Lochos part way through the first turn.

I was able to move more coherently and get my slingers catapulted forwards to a position where they could shoot into the center of the table.

the draw of the stones left Owyn a bit more exposed but his Lochagos ordered his heavy hoplites into phalanx. He was not too worried about my puny slingers.

The Spartan Lochos. the medium hoplites are off to frame left, guarding the flank.

He kept his Lochagos and slingers back. This turned out to be a mistake. My slingers began to break apart his phalanx by plinking a couple of wounds each turn.

The two medium hoplite groups fought each other on the flank for most of the battle. They pushed each other back and forth but never managed to kill each other off. We joked that they were the mercenaries and just banged their shields together while they chatted about how they weren't getting paid enough to die out here today.

In the center the slingers were having an effect. Dropping each unit down in strength while the Athenian hoplites held back and bided their time; in no hurry to rush onto the Spartan spears.

The Omen cards were piling up. These affected all of us, so a net draw. I had one that let me heal a wound when I drew an omen stone. Owyn's were all bad. I did draw one that, basically, made a Lochagos go berserk. I chose to put it on mine rather than Owyn's.

Owyn did have one hoplite in the center, with the eye on his shield (center left here) who managed to hold the center all on his own for most of the game. He finally died but he made the city proud.

The above is late in the game and Owyn is just about done. He only killed three of my models the entire game. Healing even a couple of models a turn with Omen stones was very useful.

All in all we liked the game. It's fun, quick and bloody. There are some interesting and difficult decisions to be made throughout the battle. Owyn still has a hard time accepting the loss of his toy soldiers (you can see this trend going back years on this blog) but he fought through it today and kept playing.

We are both looking forward to more games and to adding some units to our armies. The game has a low bar to entry (it's cheap) and is good fun. They also just started a kickstarter for Mortal Gods Mythic which has some gorgeous models.

Last night when I got home from work Owyn told me about some of his thoughts on tactics for the next game. I was concerned that he didn't like the game, but if he's thinking about it five days later, it was a hit.