Lord of the Rings

     When the opportunity comes up to play an old regular opponent (Matt) again, it seems daft to turn it down. If I had started this blog a couple of years ago, every post would have been either 40k or Lord of the Rings. I think my Uruk Hai war-band has probably had more outings than any other set of models I own bar maybe my old Necromunda gang.

       So, here is the battle report of the first of the two games;

      I was using my Uruk Hai force, while he used his free people's force, a mix of Rohan, Minas Tirith and an ent.

      The scenario was 'Hold Ground', where we had to capture the statue in the middle. Rolling for each of our war-bands we ended up in the weird situation where he picked where his units started, and then picked where my units start as well. From our past games he knew the strength of my Uruks a solid shield wall supported by pikes coupled with a fast moving flanking force of scouts, so he tried to spread my Uruks out as much as he could and maroon my scouts somewhere he could pick them off before moving onto my main force. My Uruk scouts are in the top of the picture, the bulk of my Uruks in the right side, while he had put his hard Minas Tirith foot troops in the bottom to hold the objective and his fast moving Rohan cavalry on the left to pick off my scouts.

      The characters to watch out for in this game are the brother and sister duo of Eomer and Eowyn, both mounted an in the Rohan cavalry unit and my trusty named Uruk Hai captain Mauhur, a scout leader who increased the movement rate of scouts in his war-band and uses two swords like a blender.

      While the ent could quite happily kill 2 or 3 Uruks every turn it won combat, it just wasn't getting those chances due to the sheer amount of orcs I kept throwing at it. When the combat is 11 or 12 dice verses 3, the chances of the ent winning become really small, although a roll of a 6, on any dice, for the ent was an automatic win.

    While I just couldn't do anything about the ent, no matter what I threw at it, my scouts had managed to take out all of his cavalry, mostly due to so seriously good dice rolls and my only decent character, Mauhur, being buried in the unit. Matt broke the Rohan siblings off from the slaughter that was going on in the top left of the field and tried to use them to free up the ent to make some decisive charges.

        It was at this point in the game that Matt realised throwing everything at my formation in the middle really wasn't working, especially after my scouts had finished off the cavalry and had charged his force from behind. So he tried to pull out, regroup and get ready to try again.

      With the death of Eowyn in one turn and then Eomer following the turn after, it was left to the ent to properly break my forces. Both sides were actually broken by this point, but passing insane amounts of courage tests to stay in the field.

        When his ent died it became obvious that if it wasn't all over before, it definitely was now and the tidying up began. It was also at about this point when we both realised we had forgotten about the game objectives entirely. . . .

     I didn't take any photos of the second game, which is slightly annoying as it was a much closer and more interesting game, but a weird mid-start of the week gaming session is a refreshing break from all the work pressure. It's a really good feeling to get an old army out and play a game of something that I had almost forgotten I used to like, although with a rule set that we had played so many games of in the past, it was an odd feeling having the rule book open the whole time constantly checking ourselves. It has to be worth going through the cupboards and dusting off old armies again, they deserve a look in.
      And never leave home without Mauhur in your Uurk army . . .

Thanks for reading