Rollin' to Roskilde

Yes, we went to Roskilde.  For those not familiar with Dark Age naval history (I can't even imagine), Roskilde is the site of the most significant Viking archaeological find.  Like Oseberg and Sutton Hoo, it opened up a whole world for researchers.

For us, it was a side trip from a long weekend in Copenhagen.  We took a cheap regional train from the capital west to the island of Zeeland.  The twenty mile trip took about forty minutes from platform to platform.  It's an ideal day trip if you happen to be spending time in the area.

A side note on Copenhagen and Denmark: it's wickedly costly.  The exchange rate seems great.  You hand over your dollars or euros for lots and lots of colorful kroner which seems amazing.  Then you go to spend that and realize that everything, especially in Copenhagen, is fabulously expensive.  On our last night there, I spent 144Kr on a single bottle of good American beer.  A hot dog from a street vendor was was roughly $7.

Expensive as it is, it's still full of happy people riding everywhere on rickety bicycles, pleased with their quality healthcare and high standard of living.  It's a real socialist hellscape.

In the town of Roskilde is the site of the cathedral where Denmark's royalty are married and buried, going back as far as Harald Bluetooth, the viking who famously made the practice of talking on a cell phone while driving legally despite it being just as dangerous as when one is actually holding the phone.  Dammit, Harald.

This guy's the Danish Norm Abram.

It's also the site of the Viking Ship Museum.  For dark age gaming fanatics, it doesn't get much better.
The museum has a collection of ships pulled up from the bottom of the fjord and a group of replicas that patrols can take out onto the water.  They even have craftsmen onsite, building new replicas and fashioning ship fittings.

All in all, there were over a dozen ships in various stages of seaworthiness, with more than half of them being incredibly accurate replicas.  That means that the Danes have built more real viking ships in the last decade than Gripping Beast has.  To this day, I'm convinced that they only have those things in the catalog to round out the line-up.  It's like Honda continually teasing the idea of bringing back the NSX just so that car enthusiasts will think the company is still capable of more than boring family cars.

Let it go, Rasmus.

My Danish friend Rasmus was caught looking longingly at the ships, no doubt thinking of a happier time when his people had a much rowdier, though less informed notion of what constituted a good day trip.  I think he was ready to chuck his European sports coupe and Surface tablet for a longship and an ax.

His Australian girlfriend was present to remind us of what happened when folks put her people on ships.  No more "green and pleasant land".  Just Paul Hogan, Yahoo Serious, and drop bears.  Pretty grim stuff.

One thing that did surprise me a bit was how low these things sat in the water and just how narrow they were.  With the exception of the knarr, they all had relatively little freeboard.  I'm fairly certain it was so the rowers could dip their hands down and make ripples in the water.

A small knarr, or trading ship.

There's no way I'm painting a Gripping Beast ship like this.

Actual Danes commuting.

Not everyone was as excited about the ships as I was.

Returning and The Game

I've been away from this blog for a while.  I've been away from gaming and painting just as long.  I blame Games Workshop for releasing Age of Sigmar and ruining wargaming for everyone.

During my parents' visit, my father and I did get to play SAGA, albeit only one game.  Travel and gaming don't mix.  One long learning game.  It may have set the European record as the longest game of SAGA ever played.  During the course of it, we may have read the rule book four times trying to clarify what special abilities did and how one could cross a river.

Game length and general confusion aside, it was a lot of fun.  Now we just have to fly them back for a re-match.  Lord knows, I need something during these long dark German winters and one can only stomach so much Tatort and bourbon.

I'd written previously about my unhappiness with the green gaming mat I'd ordered from Hobbylink.  After playing on it for several hours, I came to dislike it slightly less.  It held up and books on the edges flattened it pretty quickly.  Unfortunately, someone else had a stronger opinion it and it is no more.  I'll come back to that later.

There aren't many photos of the actual game.  We started out in the afternoon, but didn't finish up until fairly late in the evening.  By then the light was rotten, especially for such a demanding cell phone photographer as myself.

The setup was pretty much your typical SAGA game.  A few buildings of various sizes, a river, some stands of trees, and one lazy cat.  She counted as high terrain for the purpose of line-of-sight.

We did get the cat to move eventually, but she got her revenge in the end.  Nature finds a way, or something like that.

The Irish faction set its dogs on the furry beast.

The Irish assaulted the farm where the Normans took refuge.

We played the Homeland scenario with the Normans defending against Irish raiders.  What this meant, was that ranged units sat back in the buildings and shot at the Irish as they slowly made their approach.  

The faction dice also weren't my friends in this game.  Turn after turn, I'd fail to get a single helmet on the dice, which ruled out nearly every single special ability.  If it weren't for sturdy walls in that village, my Normans would have been slaughtered.

In the end, the Irish failed to take out the Normans, which was hardly a rousing victory for the Norman soldiers, who saw their knights smashed by their Celtic foes while the archers and crossbowmen took potshots from inside the farm buildings.  Yup, the epic poetry just writes itself.

Shortly after that game, we were all off to train and fly around Europe, seeing Posnan, Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Bruges.  I did pick up a Gripping Beast Wandering Bard at Battlefield Berlin, which was nice.  I'll have to paint him up for my next game so he can sing the praises of Normans who valiantly hid among the chicken coops and fired an angry band of peasants and dogs.  Huzzah!

Upon returning to Germany, we got to see what the cat had added to the game.  She vomited on the river and the mat and shed all over the rest, rubbing the hair into turf.  The river was cleanable, but the mat was a total write-off.