The Last March Of The Ents

"My business is with Isengard tonight. With a rock and stone. Rarum-rum! Come my friends. The Ents are going to war. It is likely that we go to our doom. The last march of the Ents".

      As I promised in my Look at the trees, they're moving! post, here is the battle report of the Last March of the Ents;

      The scenario is Treebeard and 3 ents vs 500 points of Isengard forces. The good side wins if they destroy all 3 of the Isengard mining structures, the evil side wins if they kill all the ents before they destroy all of the structures. If Treebeard is killed all the good side can do is draw. To make it more interesting any evil warriors that get killed have a chance of being recycled on a 4+.

The 4 Ents

        The board was set up and ready to go before my regular LotR opponent (Matt) even got round as the scenario is very specific on how the set up is done. The 3 structures are 12 inches apart on a 2 by 4ft board, with random rocky terrain mixed in to stop it being too flat. The orcs are all set up around the structures, while the ents have to set up along one short edge of the board.

     The first turn of shooting saw some truly amazing shooting by the orc archers, with two wounds being caused on Treebeard himself. With only 3 wounds at his best, this was a potentially game changing turn of shooting, as keeping Treebeard alive was Matt's most important objective.

     After an early thrown rock from Treebeard and then the rest of the ents going into the first structure on-mass, it was quickly one down, two to go.

      At this point I decided the best thing I could do was bundle every orc I had into what ever target I could, easier said than done having to pass a courage test every time I wanted to charge. The ents higher fight value really was their biggest asset, a roll of a 6 was an automatic win, then killing anything but a captain on a 3+ meant that if they won the combat I generally lost at least a couple of orcs to each ent a turn.

      After what seemed like an eternity of drawn out combats the ents started to find they had space appearing around them, they had lost one of their number to achieve this but that was a small price to pay for a bit of breathing room.

     With so few orcs, each courage test to charge become even more important, I really didn't want to feed orcs to an angry ent piece meal, but every ent not in combat was throwing rocks at the second structure and this eventually took it's tole as it collapsed under the barrage.

      Down to a handful of remaining orcs, one structure remaining and 3 ents to kill, the game didn't look good for me. The only plus side was treebeard only had the single wound left, but as he was being kept hidden right at the back of the board, it was a fact I just couldn't capitalise on.

     Using the same tactic I had used to kill a ent earlier on in the game, I put every orc I had into the closest ent and, with some really lucky dice rolls, managed to take its last two wounds, killing it before it could hurt the last structure. It didn't work anywhere near as well when I tried it on the last normal ent, as I lost really valuable orcs.

     In the end the last normal ent won a couple of combats and was able to push through my remaining orcs and onto the last structure, which it took out in one monumental turn of combat. Winning the ents a much deserved win.

     Some interesting stats from the course of the game;
- the ents killed 68 orcs, with 28 of those orcs coming back again,
- 8 wounds were caused to the ents, 3 from shooting, 2 from archers in combat and 3 from two captains. Considering my force was about 40 orcs strong, and only 8 of those were archers this is a hugely disproportionate amount of wounds.

     So yeah, I came so close at the start of the game, almost killing Treebeard, but it all started to go wrong quite quickly. I think next time I am going to do a lot more ebay scouring and get myself a load more normal orcs, and lose all the shields from the ones that have them to save some points for more orcs.
     What made it worse, was this was the first of a hat-trick of wins for Matt that day. All I can say is I hate wizards. . .

Thanks for reading this marathon post. Normal service will resume.