Dark Age - Initial Impressions

Steve and I got together last week to try his Dark Age game. Sadly, we forgot to take any photos, so all photos here were taken pre- or post- game.

Dark Age is a kind of post-apocalyptic game set on the planet Samaria... after humans colonised it and regressed (according to the fluff). One draw for me is that the game was created (AFAIK) because the game designers were so taken with the designs and artwork of the artist Brom that they created a game based on them. As a fan of Brom's art, I can only agree wholeheartedly 😁

 

The models are mostly metal (with larger ones being resin) and are quite imaginative. They already have 5 or 6 main factions with several sub factions.

Game play is your standard minis skirmish game, with combat as roll to hit, roll to save. So that saves 1 step from the roll to hit, roll to damage, roll to save routine some other games *cough* Infinity *cough* put you through. The game uses a d20 which (like Infinity) leads to some pretty swingy results. In Dark Age a "1" is a crit/auto-success etc.

A standard game is recommended at 500 points. But we used just the 300 point starter boxes for Kukulkani and the Forsaken factions. 

 

In our game, we had about 5 models each. The Kukulkani is a faction that thrives on death. They get what is known as bio-energy to weave their Rituals. The Forsaken on the other hand, can use their APs to cast Psychogenics (about the same as the Kukulkani Rituals).

So since the game mechanics are pretty standard, what Dark Age boils down to is if you like the background fluff (CMON has put of several books now) and the factions and sculpts, and the special skills/powers each faction has. 

I'll need to play a few more games using the full 500 points to really get a feel for the game, but from what I can see, it's neither better nor worse than most of the skirmish games out there that's not had really widespread acceptance (e.g.  Eden, Bushido, etc.)  

I did enjoy our small demo/learning game... but maybe that was because I won? 😁 The game went down the wire: a duel between our last 2 minis (every other model died).