Who'd have Thought It?

Well, after years of avoiding GW products I've gone and bought a book.
For various reasons I gave up playing both Warhammer and Warhammer 40K quite a while ago and focused my efforts on other systems.  I thought that would be it for me and GW.

But I've always had a large soft spot for The Lord Of The Rings; books, films and the Strategy Battle Game that GW brought out.

It was inevitable that I would try the game, and I liked it.  I've played many a game with friends, family and even ran a campaign at a school club once, which went down very well.  Of course it wasn't perfect.  Some of the minis seemed to be a bit too powerful to me, and I had issues with some of the extrapolated material, [warning - mini rant ahead] and you should never, ever name the Nazgul individually.  Even Tolkien only named one and gave a title to another.  Still, it provided a fun game and it was marvelous to play games clearly set in Middle Earth.
The game seemed to die after the first trilogy had been out a while, only to resuge with the Hobbit.  A new version of the game, and a load more minis.  I was less impressed with some of these, such as the special rules for different weapon types, but they could be supplemental rules, so I ignored them.  As the support for the game seemed to dwindle with the Hobbit films (look at the releases; a boxed game and hardback book for the first film, a thin booklet for the second, and a PDF for the third) I sort of gave up, though I did have a period of working out (with Merlin) the Kings of War stats for our LotR minis.  Other games systems came along, and it became harder to get the minis.

Now it seems that GW are once more looking at the game.  The recently published a hardback version of their skirmish campaign system, Battle Companies.  This focused on a small group of fighters that fought battles and gradually improved, rather like the earlier 'Mordheim' game, and a system would be replicated in Legends of the Old West (Cowboys) and Legends of the High Seas (Pirates). Similar systems are now common in games such as Deadzone.
The Battle Company rules were originally published in White Dwarf, and later in the (rather excellent) Strategy Battle Games in Middle Earth part work.  This new book updates the companies to include many of the new releases such as Iron Hills dwarves, Goblin Town goblins and Thranduil's Court.  There has also been a tidying up of the rules and some small adjustments, some more scenarios and a narrative campaign.
I notice that the logo on the back is not 'Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game', nor 'The Hobbit Strategy Battle Game' but 'Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game'.  So perhaps we will see more releases in the near future?

This means that in between my other projects I will be assembling a couple of Battle Companies, probably Mordor and something elven.  I could simply dig out some of my already painted stuff, but that would make no impact on the lead mountain, so I'll start from scratch.  The good news is that the starter companies are only a handful of minis.  In the spirit of multiple usage I'll be looking at using them in Dragon Rampant as well.  In fact I already have enough Rohan troops to make a Dragon Rampant force.

As Aragon (almost ) said; "Lets paint some orc".

P.S. I should say that after checking on the GW website (and how long is it since I looked on there?) I see that they do a hardback volume to cover the second and third Hobbit films.  Not quite as nice to my eyes as the three 'Journey' books for the Lord of the Rings which included scenery building and miniature painting projects as well, but still.