Saturday 14 May 2011

Strandhögg

Strandhogg in old Norse was a Viking tactic, based on the spies followed by a flash raid, like commandos on the coast. One of its possible, but non exhaustive significance is “fight on sand or on the beach”.
It was almost exlusively a Norwegian Vikings technique of combat.
The Vikings had already developed spy networks from their many commercial counters vicus. These spies informed them of the local customs, the dates of religious feasts, helped with translation and indicated places to plunder and personalities to be removed and hold to ransom. It happened that Vikings made these raids against their own countrymen as well. Harald I, known as Harald Fairhair, prohibited strandhögg on the Norwegian territory.

http://theminiaturespage.com/news/551674/


6 comments:

Paul´s Bods said...

Strandhogg...Great name for a beach fight :-D
Cheers
paul

Paul O'G said...

I'm very interested in what scenarios it has.

You might also want to check out the free Age of Blood rules, which we have really been enjoying for our Viking raids. You'll find them here:

http://www.rebelpublishing.net/resources/Age_of_Blood_2nd_Edition.pdf

wardy-la said...

Thanks for the link there AoB looks very interesting.
Not played them yet but Strandhogg are a pretty fast and stripped down set of skirmish rules for about 50 figures (1:1 ratio) per side. Reviews seem to have been positive from what I can tell.
Unfortunately no scenarios but I think they would suit simple raid type games pretty well. Not sure from a campaign aspect yet.
Good playtest and review on BoardGameGeek here -
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/540361/strandhogg-a-review-and-a-playtest

Ray Rousell said...

I've not heard of these before, I'll look them up.
I've some free Viking flags for download on my blog, take a look!
cheers
Ray
http://onelover-ray.blogspot.com/2011/02/vikingsaxon-flags-no-6.html

Paul O'G said...

Thanks for that wardy-la, I'll check them out. Cheers

captain arjun said...

I use these rules for fantasy skirmish. The command and morale system is great, but the melee system... not so.

You can see my game reports over at my blog.