Mortal Gods - 1st Outing.

Whilst work on the Spanish continues at pace with a deadline of Thursday to get them tabletop ready, a rather fun distraction with Paul rolling out his fantastic Greek collection for Mortal Gods.

The mechanics are simple with each unit/character gaining a pebble, White for units and Black for leaders and heroes. You also have three Red omen pebbles which generate a positive or negative event card which can impact characters or battlefield events. Be careful though once all the red stones are drawn the turn ends.

Combat uses specialist dice with Swords for attack and Shields for defence, depending on your character you might get to use the pegasus symbol to aid you. You roll off attack dice vs defence dice but only if you burn your unt action (in which case you take your colour pebble out of the bag.) otherwise you roll against your armour, this is good as it can pin troops if they choice to burn defence dice to keep casualties down. As you would expect Hoplites are good in defence but skirmishers with no armour don't last long if caught.

Even on the face of it the weakest units have a chance my priest was caught by a unit of sneaky skirmishers but the gods were truly with him today...

As each unit/character comes with their own card which holds their scores and abilities this serves as a great aid to keep us newbies informed but also serves to track units that have been activated.

There is also a nice touch where if you bring units into a Phalanx their stats improve and you place a card over the top of your unit to record their new stats, the same occurs if your 3 man units is reduced to 1 man.

Mortal Gods had a good feel to it, a large scale skirmish, but the pebbles and the omen cards gave it that ancient slant. The units sizes are relatively small so a single box set and a couple of characters should give you all you need for an evenings gaming. The various units types give you plenty of scope to mix and match plus the cards for each set out on the side of the table means that we didn't spend all evening diving into the rule book.

Heroes are tough but are not invincible and if you are using them offensively they won't be able to command troops on the table which can slow your tactics down and hinder your morale.

Overall a good fun system which gives a good gaming experience, the danger is with on a few figures to a unit you could be dragged into thinking that's not to many to get a force together , so now I am spending time on the web tempted by Persians as I had a bit of a thing for the Peloponnesian Wars many years ago. The latest offering from Footsore miniatures does look nice just not sure about the detail on the uniforms to do them justice.